


A Study of Lazarus Taxons (and the Other Things Gordon Freeman Cannot Kill)

by Nymm_at_Night



Category: Half-Life
Genre: Alyx the warrior queen of Sci-fi Antifa, American Sign Language, Barney the Agriculture School Graduate, Deaf Character, Disabled Character, Discussions of Police Brutality, Ecology, Gen, Gordon the pet torpedo of Sci-fi Antifa, Half-Life 2, Homosexual Oceanic Post-apocalyptic Road Trip, Internalized Homophobia, M/M, Needles, Post-Apocalypse, Post-Canon, Road Trips, The Nineties (tm), discussions of starvation, implied suicide ideation
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-18
Updated: 2021-02-08
Packaged: 2021-03-16 08:34:31
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 4
Words: 51,528
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28828248
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Nymm_at_Night/pseuds/Nymm_at_Night
Summary: The Combine's chokehold on humanity may have loosened, but their grip left deep scars on the Earth. In the wake of ecological devastation, Alyx, Barney and Gordon find themselves chasing a last ditch hope through the wastelands, desperate to breathe life back into a dead sea. Between the Combine, a contract and the fundamental truth of ACAB, they'll have to overcome more than ghosts if they want a piece of the future. The highway's long, the stakes are high, and it's the end of the end of the world.
Relationships: Barney Calhoun & Alyx Vance, Barney Calhoun & Gordon Freeman & Alyx Vance, Barney Calhoun/Gordon Freeman, Gordon Freeman & Alyx Vance, Griggs (Half-Life)/Sheckley (Half-Life)
Comments: 39
Kudos: 90





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Special thanks to my extremely patient beta yellow_caballero, my good friends xen_baja_blast, Jack and reptilianraven, and everyone else who supported this fic while it was being written. This took way too long and I'm very happy to finally be posting it. I hope you enjoy reading it as much as I did writing it!
> 
> Note: In this story, the members of the resistance have their own sign language pidgin, which evolved from a combination of combat hand signals, colloquial gestures and various formal sign languages (BSL, ASL, etc.). It may bear some superficial resemblance to ASL and share some loan words, but it's distinct from it in-universe. Resistance Pidgin is yellow_caballero's invention, and is extensively and fascinatingly detailed in her fic, Quantum Suicide (9 to 5), which is absolutely incredible and I encourage everyone to read it. 
> 
> Far more pedantic note: On a medical level I know that twin elbow catheters don't make much sense given the fact that Gordon is constantly running around and moving his arms, but other options either didn't fit narrative needs or veered into the territory of Overly Self-Indulgent Wikipedia Binges. Please imagine that they run on HEV-magic.
> 
> Enjoy!

Contrary to his colleagues’s snide comments, Gordon Freeman enjoyed entertainment that didn’t involve wandering through the HVAC system of Black Mesa. Each Apple II in his highschool had featured a copy of the Oregon Trail and Gordon had obsessively played it while he waited for the Audio Visual Club to muster the courage to enter the computer lab for their weekly meeting. Between the Deafness, transferring to a hearing school halfway through freshman year and the collective trauma from The Meat Incident, even the teachers had been somewhat wary. Gordon had had a lot of time to master the art of rationing supplies and dodging dysentery, and therefore had considered himself somewhat of an expert on rugged caravans crossing dangerous wilderness.

Disappointingly, White Forest’s caravan was nothing like the Oregon Trail. Instead of oxen and covered wagons, it had salvaged eighteen-wheelers running on spoiled cooking oil. Rather than rugged cowboys on horseback, it had a half a dozen Vortigaunts who had managed the unenviable task of saddling antlions. Most worryingly, it was on the other side of the world from Oregon, and would presumably have great trouble reaching it. 

Alyx, whose eyes had started to glaze over, wordlessly lifted her rifle and shot a Wasteland Scanner out of the sky. Barney jumped at the gunshot and looked hopefully at Gordon. Unfortunately for him, the last time Gordon had heard something, let alone startled, had involved a space shuttle going into orbit. His hands didn’t pause for a second, and the rant continued. 

“What the hell is an Oregon.” Alyx finally cut him off, her hands moving in the twisting, looping motions of the Resistance’s pidgin sign. “And why do you want us to go there?”

“It’s a state,” Barney explained in crisp ASL, not bothering to sit up to join the conversation. “Like the American kind.”

“Is it next to New Mexico?”

“No.”

Alyx sighed and leaned glumly against one of the supply crates Gordon had hauled onto the roof of their truck, once again reminded that America had not always revolved around a single government research facility. 

“Gordon used to live near it though,” Barney added. “Just north of it.”

Gordon nodded and carefully spelt out “S-E-A-T-T-L-E” for Alyx. “My hometown.”

Alyx sat up, curiosity piqued. “What was it like?”

“There was a tower—way smaller than a Citadel—but you could see it from anywhere in town. And a big zoo—"

“With real deer? And raccoons?”

Gordon shrugged. “Probably. It was always cloudy, but the rain was safe then.”

He trailed off and glanced at Barney, who was drumming his fingers on the barrel of his pulse rifle. This was usually the part of the conversation where he let him know if a beloved cultural landmark had been nuked while he had been gone.

“I don’t know,” Barney said, shaking his head. “They got me and Kleiner in a transport a few weeks after the war. I never got the chance to snoop around before they shipped us out”

“That’s okay,” Gordon said, even though it was clearly not.

The roof of the tractor-trailer settled into silence again. Barney shuffled a deck of cards and fought the wind to set them down in a spread for solitaire. Alyx’s hands spiraled through an oft repeated pidgin poem. She had explained the meaning to him once, an adaptation of a Vortish ballad of the Resonance Cascade, but the signs themselves were too esoteric for Gordon’s limited pidgin vocabulary. He caught the words for Vortigaunt—index fingers and thumbs in an oval, pressed over the forehead—and the names the future had given him. Head bowed, flat hands opening out from the chest like double doors. A single finger held aloft then brought down to cover the eyes like a mask. Arms in the lambda, one making the ASL for G. Opener of the way. Anticitzen One. Dr. Gordon Freeman.

He sighed and fiddled with Gravity Gun’s settings, cradling it in his lap like a heavy and mildly radioactive child, and didn’t think about Seattle. Some things were better off boxed up and ignored. Gordon tweaked the default repulsion a step lower and stared out into the distance.

The highway the convoy traveled on was surprisingly intact, far more than Highway 17 had been. The asphalt had been torn up by the roots of the yellow forest that lined each edge, but the white paint still shone in the setting sun, barely tarnished. The wind whipping past the truck tasted like pine needles and wet earth with a faint metallic edge. In the distance, tall storm clouds were gathering. Lightning flashed, arcing down to strike somewhere in the distant mountains. 

They were getting closer. 

He nudged Alyx and Barney. “We need shelter. The trucks can’t take more rain.”

Alyx nodded and scanned the horizon through the scope of her rifle. “The trees break over there. It’s an old town, I think. You can see the concrete through the pines.”

Barney squinted against the sun. “Think we could scope it out before the convoy reaches it? I don’t want to get woken up by a bad case of crabs.”

Gordon was already clambering down the side of the truck, a gravity gun slung over his back and his helmet tucked under his elbow. Alyx grinned at the prospect of live target practice and slid down the ladder, laughing as Barney complained about his bad knees.

The air was thick with exhaust and antlion pheromones as they wove between the fleet of trucks. Gordon could still smell it through the air filters as he latched his helmet back on. The HUD flickered for a moment, loading up the terrible sound recognition software, and he watched as text scrolled across the bottom of his screen.

**[MECHANICAL HUM. ANIMAL DISTRESS (LARGE). ENGINE.]**

Everything in order then.

The caravan was headed by a pair of Vortigaunts on antlion-back, one with a missing eye and the other wearing a sweater with a hole cut in the chest for their third arm. Each clutched a set of reins that had been carefully tied around the blue spines on the guards’ backs, rendering them docile.

The two riders nodded to them as they jogged to get ahead of the trucks. Gordon sighed and reached for the horrible little text to speech keyboard on his gauntlet, but Alyx was already explaining, saving him the indignity of its stupid, monotone voice. He had to give her some of his rations tonight as thank you.

**[THERE’S STORM CLOUDS ROLLING IN FROM THE EAST AND THEY’RE THUNDERING BAD]** Gordon read.  **[WE SAW AN OLD HUMAN TOWN UP AHEAD AND THOUGHT WE COULD GO AND CLEAN IT OUT BEFORE THE STORM HIT]**

The Vortigaunt turned to their partner and said something the suit didn’t pick up—Vortigese never seemed to work well with computers—then shut all their eyes and lowered the reins, tracing the air with their third arm. The antlion sniffed the air and fanned its spines, and Gordon knew the Vortigaunt was tracing the Vortal Chords. He could feel it, the careful tug of the binds that tied his heartbeat to Alyx’s and the appraising, derisive twange of those tangled and knotted through him and his contract.

He was grateful he had put on the helmet already. Nobody needed to see how nauseous he felt.

The Vortigaunt stiffened and their eyes fluttered open again. Gordon watched the HUD slowly load each word, drumming his fingers on the handle of the gravity gun.  **[OUR SCOUT HAS TRAVELED FAR AHEAD WE HAVE SEEN THE PLACE OF WHICH YOU SPEAK A GREAT HUMAN SHELTER THAT STILL STANDS YOU MUST GO]**

“Has it been shelled?” Barney asked, signing along as he spoke.

The other Vortigaunt shook their head.  **[WE KNOW NOT]**

Barney groaned.

**[IF YOU WISH TO REACH THE STRUCTURE BEFORE THE STORM THE CALHOUN AND THE ALYX VANCE MUST RIDE]** the Vortigaunt instructed. They cast their many worried eyes at Gordon in his 120-pound, lead-lined HEV suit.  **[FOR THE GUARDS SAKE THE FREEMAN MUST WALK]**

Alyx tried to maintain the dignity conferring with the Vortigaunts always seemed to demand, but her jiggling leg (one step away from a good pace) gave away her eagerness. If there was one thing Alyx enjoyed more than plowing cars into fascists, it was being able to feed the cars and pet their chiton afterwards.

The Vortigaunt stared at her. She stared at the Vortigaunt. The Vortigaunt made use of its many eyes to win the staring contest.

“I promise I haven’t crashed an antlion in years,” Alyx swore, crossing her heart. “I’m educated in the use of pheropods! So’s Gordon!”

**[THE FREEMAN MATTERS NOT THE ALYX VANCE WILL BE HANDLING THE REINS]**

“I promise I’ll be responsible.”

The Vortigaunt narrowed their eyes.  **[THE ALYX VANCE WILL NOT HACK AND RIDE]**

“Yes, of course.”

**[THE ALYX VANCE WILL SEND A FLARE IF SOMETHING IS AMISS]**

“Sure!” 

**[THE ALYX VANCE WILL BE BACK BEFORE NIGHTFALL IF THE RUINS ARE NOT SAFE]**

Alyx nodded frantically.

The two Vortigaunts sighed in unison and the closer one dropped the reins into her outstretched hands. She whooped as they climbed off. Barney shot Gordon a look that said “You’re still the legal arbiter of my will,” but she was already clambering onto its back like she’d ridden antlions her whole life. From what she and Barney had told him of her childhood between rounds of drinks and gunfire, she probably had.

Barney settled uncomfortably behind the saddle and held tight to Alyx’s jacket as she cracked the reins, laughing madly. The antlion screeched, rearing up on its hindlegs, and set off at full tilt in a flurry of pinwheeling legs. The HEV suit helpfully registered  **[SCREAMS (HUMAN)]** as they tore down the pavement.

Gordon knelt low in a runner’s lunge and chased them. He had never been terribly athletic before Black Mesa, but with the suit on, he didn’t need to be. The motors hid the limp in his right leg from a HECU grenade, the catheters in his arms fed artificially oxygenated blood into his veins, and coils of coolant tubing wicked heat away from his skin. He could run for hours like this, a gun in his hand, a target at the end of the road. He had.

The landscape of what had once been Romania whisked by as the highway looped through the woods. Alien birds swooped down at the antlion, mobbing the invaders of their nesting grounds. Alyx pumped her fist as the antlion leapt clear over a long abandoned car, startling a lumpy looking squirrel that had camped out beneath it.

The trees finally gave way to offramps and intersections and the ruins of the city. Headcrab shells stuck out of collapsed tower blocks and stores like ancient monoliths, long overgrown with yellow, dying moss. As Gordon stepped towards the heaps of destroyed concrete and rebar, the radiation indicator on his HUD blinked faster and brighter. No safe haven here.

Alyx was already leading the antlion away from the ruins, towards an enormous box of a building. It sat on the other side of an ocean of asphalt, untouched save for two decades of decay and an enormous hole in its side. The old sign above the wound was missing letters, but Gordon could still recognize what “M LL” meant. 

The antlion slowed to a dignified trot as they crossed the parking lot, daintily picking its way over fallen streetlights and long abandoned cars. Behind some of the dusty windows, shadowy figures clutched their seatbelts, still and unmoving.

Gordon jogged to catch up with the antlion, which had parked itself in front of the hole that had once been the front entrance. It was nosing hopefully through old garbage cans and chewing on empty soda bottles with mandibles the length of Gordon’s forearm as Alyx helped Barney off its back. Barney had never been a huge fan of the trams at Black Mesa, but appeared to be reevaluating his standards. Gordon gave him a supportive thumbs up. 

Alyx hitched the antlion to the fire hydrant nearest the dumpster and stepped back to admire her handiwork. The antlion clambered into the dumpster and began burrowing into the ancient refuse. “Nature is beautiful,” she signed.

Gordon breathed a sigh of relief, able to ignore the monotonous scroll of the captioning software again. English was really a horrible, emotionless language.

“Better get this over with.” Barney flicked on the light taped to his CP-issued pulse rifle and stepped into the darkness of the old mall, Alyx and Gordon at his heels. Muted sunlight filtered through dirty skylights and glinted off the splintered store windows. Inside, mannequins posed in rotten cotton blouses and pristine polyester jumpsuits, ripped straight from the cover of the last Vogue ever published. There were no bodies that Gordon could see, and distantly he remembered that the Resonance Cascade had happened on a beautiful Sunday morning. In hindsight, Black Mesa had shown a real disdain for the idea of God.

It would have been almost peaceful, but the enormous gouge in the floor belied a far greater violence. Something massive had torn through the tiles and down into the concrete, deep enough that Gordon could see the basement peaking through the pink insulation. Barney shone his light down, but the thin beam gave away nothing but a few old shipping crates.

At the end of the corridor, they found what had left the trail of wreckage. Barney groaned and held one hand in a pincer, furiously rutting it against his fist. “Fucking headhumpers.”

An enormous headcrab shell, the kind Gordon had only seen in the heart of Ravenholm, had torn through the mall and shattered an enormous fountain. The empty husk now lay in the rubble, collecting a heavy layer of dust. Its payload had long since scattered, taking anyone they found with them. 

Barney grimaced and kicked the exoskeleton of a long-departed headcrab. “Damn Combine. They never surprise, but I’m always disappointed.”

A large ceramic pot and its dead ficus scraped along the ground as Gordon instinctively grabbed the nearest heavy object with the gravity gun. He was comforted that all the Resistance needed of him today was to kill a bunch of headcrabs. That, at least, was easy. Gordon killed headcrabs like he breathed. Gordon rolled over in his sleep and killed headcrabs, much to the perpetual terror of Kleiner.

The three of them fanned out over the plaza, weapons and ficus raised. Gordon approached the H&M with baited breath, but the murky beam of his flashlight found only cracked tiles and a few fossilized rats among the windbreakers and jelly sandals. The cash register had fallen off the counter at some point and Gordon leafed through a stack of completely useless Romanian lei, the gravity gun buzzing against his hip.

The back room was just as empty, save for some animal’s abandoned nest wedged between the coffee makers. Gordon turned to leave and nearly threw the ficus through Alyx’s head as she appeared in the door frame. 

Alyx put up her hands in mock surrender. “Easy chief. I need your help.”

Gordon lowered the ficus. The captioning software scrolled faster and faster as it registered the familiar  **[BONK BONK BONK]** of the gravity gun slamming an object into a corner.

“Relax, everything’s fine. Even Barney’s fine.” Alyx grinned. “What, you won’t even take your wife shopping? Some husband you are.”

“Please stop telling people we’re married.”

“Strong words from the guy who bound our very souls and Vortal Beings,” she swept her hands out dramatically as she led him out into the plaza, “together in a pit full of antlions.”

Gordon groaned and chucked a piece of cement at her with the Gravity Gun.

She dodged it easily and it skidded down the aisle. “What, afraid to be seen with me in public? How dare you disrespect our Las Vegas shotgun wedding?”

“Do you even know what Las Vegas is?”

“Was,” Alyx corrected. “Barney liked to talk about that—" she fumbled for a moment, struggling to remember the signs, “‘company retreat’ where you got sloshed and fell two stories into a fountain.”

“So glad Barney survived the Black Mesa nuke. So glad he didn’t get his brain eaten by headcrabs or Xenian Brain Flukes,” Gordon grumbled. “First friendly face in City 17 my ass.”

Alyx laughed. “Didn’t he almost try mouth-to-mouth? I’m sure that was fun.”

Gordon didn’t remember much of the event, but he did remember the endless sideways glances at the water cooler, as if the rest of Sector C hadn’t jumped to enough conclusions before Barney had gotten ready to suck face in front of the entire department. He grimaced. “Don’t remind me.”

Alyx shrugged and walked into one of the shops. The ceiling had caved in, flattening half of the store in a mountain of rebar and sheet metal. Gordon could tell it had once been a shoe store from the endless crushed boxes and 50% off signs that littered the floor, but all it had in stock now were snapped high heels and moldering shoelaces. 

Alyx snatched a lone pump from the dirt and fiddled with the six inch heel. “I didn’t know Aperture had gotten their Long Fall tech to the public. They really managed to streamline it.”

“They never got the Long Fall Boots out of testing,” Gordon signed, wrists snapping through the air. Black Mesa and Aperture Science may have been buried under the might of the Combine and a nuclear warhead, but it would take more than the near annihilation of mankind for him to let go of his Sector C pride. “Aperture couldn’t make a finished product if their lives depended on it. Black Mesa on the other hand—"

“Sold the HEV suit to the marines?” Alyx quirked an eyebrow and waved the high heel at the shelving unit in their way. “That went well.”

“Breen started it, I finished it,” Gordon bitched and punted it across the room. “Aperture started anything, finished nothing and went bankrupt for it.”

“Old man. You sound just like dad and Magnusson.” She considered the pump’s faded holographic pleather. “People just wore these? Didn’t they get stuck in the dirt? They don’t seem very… useful.”

He shrugged. “Usually only to clubs. They didn’t have dirt floors, so I don’t think girls minded so much.”

Alyx frowned a little wistfully, set it carefully down on a toppled sign and continued on through the forest of fallen fluorescent lamps and gypsum tiles until she stopped at the base of the caved-in ceiling. She raised an arm and pointed. Twenty feet up, crammed between layers of sticky pink insulation, was a shoebox printed with the single most garish pair of boots Gordon had ever seen. The heels were like bricks. There were flame decals on the sides.

“I need them,” Alyx said, dropping her usual Resistance pidgin for clean, exacting ASL. “Please Gordon, you’re my only hope.”

Gordon sighed, aimed the gravity gun, and grabbed the box. It was wedged pretty deep in the wreckage, but it came free after a few minutes of tugging. Alyx snatched it out of the air as it whizzed towards them and eagerly tore it open. 

“They’re so beautiful.” Alyx stared down at the horrible cowboy boots with a tenderness she normally reserved for antlion larva or D0G. “And they’re real cowhide too! We had to eat all of our leather last winter.”

Gordon gave her a tentative thumbs up as she tucked her battered sneakers under her arm and pulled on the boots. She grinned and did a mock twirl. “Thank you.”

Something bounced off his shoulder, and Gordon turned to see a clearly out of breath Barney clambering over the rubble with a handful of pebbles. “Christ, am I going to have to put a bell on you two? Didn’t ya hear me calling?”

“Barney,” Gordon said, pausing to wipe an imaginary tear from his visor. “I’m sorry you had to find out like this, but I’m deaf.”

“Har har. You know what I mean,” Barney signed, rolling his eyes. “Just stop wandering off, for Pete’s sake.”

“I promise it was all worth it.” Alyx gestured to her new shoes. 

Barney whistled appreciatively. “Sheckley would kill for those.”

Alyx laughed and twirled her pistol. “Sheckley can try.”

Barney raised his hands to say something else, but he froze when the concrete behind him began to move. The fallen ceiling began to shift, robbed of its load bearing box. Barney’s mouth was moving as he scrambled towards them but Gordon had no time to read his HUD as debris began to tumble down. 

Barney was almost to them when it happened. One second, he was dodging ceiling tiles, head tucked under his arms. The next second, an enormous HVAC unit was plummeting through a brand new hole in the ceiling, trailing dead vines and dust like a comet. The floor shook like a leaf as it punched through the linoleum, inches from Barney. He teetered on the edge of the pit for a moment, flailing his arms for balance, and fell.

Gordon ran for him on instinct, but Alyx grabbed his arm and dug her heels in, pulling him back. “You’ll punch straight through the floor in that suit.”

Gordon nodded and stepped back, his heart pounding in his ears, and watched her carefully creep across the store to the hole. The wreckage was still settling, old wires snapping under the weight of pipes and fuse boxes they had become tangled in.

**[BARNEY]** Alyx waved at the pit, and Gordon glumly resigned himself to reading this very important conversation off his HUD. **[ARE YOU OKAY]**

There was a long pause before Barney answered.  **[THINK I’VE TWISTED AN ANKLE DON’T SEND DOC DOWN HERE IT’S NOTHING BUT REBAR SPIKES]**

Alyx cupped her hands around her mouth and knelt.  **[CAN YOU GET TO THE STAIRS]**

**[CAN’T SEE ANY MY LIGHT GOT CRUSHED]**

**[WE’LL GET YOU DON’T WORRY]** Alyx frowned and fidgeted with the magazine of her pistol.  **[PROMISE]**

**[YOU BETTER]**

She stood and Gordon carefully followed her back through the rubble, trusting her to keep them clear of where the floor thinned to nothing but tile and a slim layer of eroded concrete. “He looked pretty stuck. Lets find some stairs before he…” She grimaced and shoved a mannequin out of the way. “Well, before.”

Gordon nodded in agreement. Barney hated being alone.

There wasn’t any way down to the basement on this end of the mall, save for the jagged holes the shell had torn in the floor. Even Alyx wouldn’t have been able to squeeze through them. All of the doors to back rooms had been locked, and the gravity gun couldn’t pry or bust them open, no matter how many inexplicable cans of butane Gordon threw at them. 

He bit his cheek, fingers twitching on the trigger. They were taking too long.

In the end, they found the remains of an elevator before they found a staircase. The car bounced alarmingly on its strained cables as they stepped inside. Gordon was sure that even if they had a Vortigaunt with them to power it, it wouldn’t be going anywhere. He waved for Alyx to step back and blasted open the roof hatch, then put one hand over the other and boosted her up before jumping and catching the edge of the latch himself. The servos in the suit’s arms thrummed as he pulled himself up into the elevator shaft.

It was basically identical to every other elevator shaft he’d ever clambered through, aside from a truly astronomical number of cobwebs and a faint sheen of condensed water on the counterweights. In addition to the Oregon trail, Gordon considered his expertise to include wandering through elevators in all their forms. He grabbed the access ladder and started to descend, Alyx just behind him. 

The first headcrab dropped from the bottom of the elevator car, its beak dripping virulent yellow saliva as it launched itself at Gordon’s head. He caught it by the leg and casually bludgeoned it against the shaft’s wall. Alyx shot him a concerned look and he nodded. Where there was one headcrab, more followed. 

Water splashed around his knees when he dropped down the last few rungs. The basement was completely flooded, and Gordon held out a hand as he waited for the suit to analyze it. When no alerts flashed for corrosion or biohazards, he stepped back and Alyx slid down to join him. 

The HEV’s light cast strange reflections off the water as they waded out of the elevator shaft. The basement looked like it had once been some sort of storage room or holding area. Wooden crates, their contents long rotted, were stacked from floor to ceiling. Mannequins were propped against the walls and piled high in the corners. They looked like something out of one of Barney’s old weird-fiction magazines in their tattered display clothes, heads twisted on backwards and limbs bent in unnatural poses.

Alyx grabbed his shoulder and pointed ahead. Headcrab exoskeletons floated in the stagnant water, and when he looked up, he could see half a dozen sticky, pink barnacle lures. 

The orange glow of the gravity gun cut through the gloom as Gordon dragged a crate through the water and slid it underneath the barnacles. For a moment, he wasn’t sure if they’d be able to lift it, but slowly it began to rise towards their eager mouths. Gordon slipped under first, the water lapping at his chest.

When a hand closed around his ankle, he assumed it was just Alyx feeling her way through in the dark. When the grip tightened to five spears digging through the suit’s padding, he realized his mistake. The zombie lunged at him as he scrambled for his gun, grabbing him by the throat and sending them rolling through the filthy water. 

He must have been losing his touch—he hadn’t let one come this close since Black Mesa. The pallid, liver-spotted flesh of the headcrab squished up against the helmet’s visor, desperate to claim a body less rotten. Its gangrenous fingers, more sharpened bone than anything truly flesh, grabbed at the latch of his helmet, slicing the rubber seal to ribbons. Alyx was screaming something as she grabbed at its exposed spine, unable to safely fire at it. The suit captioned nothing, its microphones flooded. 

Gordon finally got his hands around the handle of the gravity gun, wrenched it between him and the zombie, and fired. The back of his helmet snapped hard against the concrete floor as the gun threw both of them back, and he watched dizzily as the barnacles, already bored with the crate, reeled the zombie in.

There was water leaking into his suit, stinging at the fresh cuts on his neck. Alyx was grabbing his arm and shouting something. Adrenaline propelled him up and he spun around just in time to knock another zombie away. There were more hands, more viscera glistening in the dark, and Alyx took his hand and they ran, the dead nipping at their heels. 

They saw light as they rounded the corner, a shaft of twilight filtering down and illuminating the dozens of shoe boxes floating in the water and twisted rebar surrounding the fallen HVAC block and Barney, who was shouting something as he pressed a charge into the secondary barrel of his pulse rifle.

Alyx yanked Gordon aside as the dark energy ball zoomed down the corridor in a blaze of nuclear fire. It incinerated the first zombie and kept going, ricocheting off the walls and the rest of the hoard until it finally launched into the ceiling at full throttle.

The whole mall shuddered above them, and the three of them winced as an enormous hunk of concrete and pipework fell from the ceiling and blocked off the hallway.

Barney’s Civil Protection uniform was streaked with dust and debris and his leg was stretched out at a strange angle, but he still managed a smile for them. “Pretty good shooting, huh?”

“That was our way out,” Alyx huffed, but she couldn’t keep the smile off her face as she ran to him. “I’m guessing you don’t have any bright ideas on how to get out of here?” 

“Didn’t have bright anything, thanks to that fucking box.” Barney shot an accusatory glare at the HVAC unit as Alyx helped him up. “I couldn’t see a thing till you got down here.”

“Don’t worry about it. Gordon always finds an escape route, no matter how stupid.”

Gordon shrugged, unable to argue. He deeply believed that when God closed a door, He always opened a window, or at the very least provided an RPG to make one.

“Can you walk?”

Barney shook his head. “I’m gonna need a hand, if you can spare it.”

“Alyx is the better shot. Not much to fling here.” Gordon wrapped an arm around Barney’s waist like the Black Mesa Emergency Training pamphlets had always instructed. Even through the padding of the HEV suit, he could feel the points of Barney’s CP armor.

“I didn’t know you waltzed,” Barney signed, waggling his eyebrows at him, and slung his arm over Gordon’s shoulders. “Have you been holding out on me?”

Gordon huffed, face warm. Together, they followed Alyx into the dark hallway, away from the light.

“Aw hell, doc.” Barney couldn’t really sign with one arm around Gordon’s shoulder, but he knew to enunciate, and this close it was easy enough to read his lips. “What’d those headhumpers do to your neck?”

Gordon lifted his free hand to spell out “I-M O-K”.

Barney rolled his eyes. They were red, and Gordon noticed a sallowness to his skin that definitely hadn’t been there that morning. “You and Alyx need to be more careful. I can’t spend the rest of my life watching every freak of nature on Earth use you as a pincushion.”

Gordon wanted to argue that it was his job to take hits, that he carted around a 200 pound suit of armor for a reason, but he could tell from the stubborn set of Barney’s jaw that he wouldn’t take that for an answer. He ducked his head and shifted his grip on Barney’s side.

Barney frowned and raised his free hand to add something, but he paused when he saw Alyx stop up ahead. 

“Can you bring the light over here?” she asked, her sign small and clipped. “Right there.”

Gordon nodded and shone HEV suit’s flashlight where she was pointing. Two skeletons, each held together by the barest of sinew, lay half submerged and holding each other. Barney’s grip tightened on his shoulder as he slowly turned to illuminate the rest of the room. The flashlight caught on more bodies in the water, half a dozen at least, countable only by their cracked skulls. More than ever, the air smelled like mold and decay.

Inspection revealed that all the supply crates in the room were all empty. Old snack wrappers floated on the surface of the scummy water, drifting in the faint breeze blowing in from the broken ceiling. Someone had painted the walls in what looked like old lipstick, carefully blending the shades into scenes from the old world. A castle balanced on the face of a mountain. Smiling faces with uneven eyes. Bart Simpson. A city with no Citadel in sight. A tally in the corner with too many hash marks. Someone had been very, very bored down here.

Gordon swallowed the bile in his throat, tried to think of a clear blue sea and the light at the end of the tunnel. 

Alyx took a long, slow breath and plucked an old book from the water. It was sopping wet, mildewed and blackened, but Gordon could tell it was a diary from pink lock dangling off of it. She looked it over for a long moment, fiddling with the frayed silk bookmark, then slipped it into the pocket of her hoodie

“Alyx, it’s okay,” Barney said. “I promise that you don’t have to take that.”

She smiled, but it didn’t reach her eyes. “Barney, you know I do.”

He hung his head. “You’re not going to like what you find.”

“When have I ever?” She drew her gun again. “C’mon.”

Their search for an exit was short and uneventful, save for a few senile headcrabs. Alyx disposed of them with none of her usual enthusiasm, barely even pausing to kick them out of the way. The door to the stairwell had been torn off its hinges by someone or something, and she and Gordon helped steady Barney as he clambered over it. A short climb up a flight of stairs and a door and they were free, breathing in the thick, heavy air of a rainstorm. 

“So much for making things quick.” Alyx frowned at the bulging, dripping ceiling tiles. “I hope the convoy got here before the storm picked up.”

Barney nodded and shifted his grip on Gordon’s shoulder. “We oughta get moving, before the ceiling comes down again.”

Together, they headed back towards the entrance, past adverts dripping with acid rain and toppled vending machines and thin mannequins with physiques Gordon had already come to associate with half-rations. A faceless woman in a sundress, a child in overalls and a tee shirt, a man in a crisp suit, poised to straighten his tie-

The air fell out of Gordon’s lungs as he spun on his heel and grabbed the gravity gun. The muzzle flared white as he grabbed the nearest vending machine and flung it at his employer in a maelstrom of glass and shrapnel. It wouldn’t hold him off for long, nothing ever seemed to connect with him, but he had to do something, find a way to steal a little more time-

Alyx grabbed him by the shoulders and shook him, her lips mouthing his name over and over. Blood thrummed in his ears and his fingers twitched for the trigger of a pulse rifle, the pin of a grenade, some violence to keep the man in the suit away. Just a few moments more, enough to say goodbye.

Alyx slid her hands down his arms to his hands, where the suit was thinnest, and squeezed them tight. There was no warmth through the gloves, but it was Alyx and that was enough. He let go of the gravity gun, letting it dangle limply at his waist.

She stared at him a moment longer, watching him pant, before she let go. “Gordon?” Distantly, he recognized she had switched to Barney’s nickname for him, the sign for physics with each hand signing ‘G’. “Hey, you’re with me, right?”

Gordon nodded, winced at a sudden wave of dizziness, and glanced at the dented remains of the vending machine. The mannequin had been crushed underneath it, ugly suit stained with long expired soda. Barney stared at him with wide eyes where he was pressed against the wall, shattered glass sticking out of the thick rubber of his boots.

Guilt bubbled up in Gordon’s throat and slowed his hands. “I’m sorry. Thought I saw something.”

She glanced down at the mangled mannequin and let out a long breath. “It’s okay.”

Barney raised his hands to speak, but for once, couldn’t seem to find the words. He turned abruptly, looking for something Gordon couldn’t hear.

Two figures with Combine rifles and flashlights appeared at the end of the hall, and Gordon only breathed when one of them raised their arms over their head, one crooked, the other pressing a fist into their forearm. A lambda, for decay.

Gordon squinted against the light of their torches and breathed a sigh of relief when he saw familiar faces. It was just Noriko and Mary. The convoy had made it.

“Freeman!” Noriko signed, somewhat haltingly. Few people in the Resistance were as fluent as Alyx and Barney, but most seemed to take learning the pidgin as a point of pride. “Status?”

“Barney has a twisted ankle.” Alyx stood up a little straighter and signed as she spoke. “Gordon got a little cut up, but I think he’s fine. Mostly surface level.”

Mary offered a hand to Barney, who leaned on her gratefully. She glanced at his ankle and muttered something to an unnamed god. Ever since Gordon had returned and proven himself a hypercompetent idiot, the Resistance had been desperate for a new address for their prayers. “It figures the Vorts were right to be worried. Well, as worried as they ever get.”

Alyx cursed. “I knew I forgot something. I’m never going to get to ride an antlion again!”

“Camped just inside,” Noriko said, twisting her hands in the pidgin for “base” and “overhang”. “Is the building safe?”

“Top floor clear, floor unstable,” Gordon answered, doing his best to keep to what he knew of the pidgin. “Basement full of headcrabs.”

She nodded. “No supplies?”

“The basement’s flooded,” Alyx said. “There’s nothing down there.”

Gordon glanced at the dark, wet stain spreading across her hoodie where the diary was hidden. Alyx caught his eye and shook her head.

As they walked back to the base, Noriko gave them an exhaustive rundown of the convoy’s remaining supplies, listing off statistics in her terse sign. Gordon nodded along amicably, now aware that the trucks had been carrying several jugs of antlion honey before the houndeyes got into them and that brake fluid existed, while Alyx made careful notes on the screen of her EMP tool and generally understood what was going on. They made a good team like that.

The trucks had been parked carefully in the mall’s entrance, their engines still for the first time in more than a day. The Vortigaunts had made a fire in the center of the corridor out of old benches and boho-chic furniture. There was an enormous pot hanging over it, secured to one of the ceiling’s exposed beams, and someone had dragged a metal air vent into the coals as a makeshift oven. The wind shifted, and Gordon was hit with the smell of woodsmoke, stewing headcrab and the dizzying miasma of acid rain. 

Off to the side, the human drivers had set up an old table and were furiously haggling over a pile of old clothing. Griggs and Sheckley were nearly nose to nose, bickering about some faded leather jacket. Griggs paused, panting, and Sheckley flicked him between the eyes. There was a long, still moment as the other drivers watched them, waiting for retribution, then in a single fluid motion, Griggs vaulted the table and tackled Sheckley to the ground. Gordon looked away as they rolled across the floor to the cheering of the other humans, suddenly feeling like an intruder.

“Alright,” Alyx said, looking over the supply list on her EMP tool. “Barney, let Mary patch you up before she gets tired of holding you up. Noriko, check with the Vorts that all of the batteries got recharged and make sure the trucks are ready for tomorrow. Gordon and I will help with the animals.”

Noriko gave a crisp salute and hurried off to the fire.

“Sure thing, boss.” Barney shot her a smile as Mary led him towards the tiny medical tent. “Anyone tell you you’re the spitting image of your father?”

Something flashed across Alyx’s face, but it was gone before Gordon could name it. She holstered her gun and traded it for her huge ring of keys, then hopped up on the tailgate of one of the trailers, unlocked it and pulled the double doors open.

Gordon winced at the smell of animal feces and and the sudden, bright scroll of  **[ANIMAL DISTRESS (LARGE). ANIMAL DISTRESS (SMALL). ANIMAL DISTRESS (MEDIUM).]** across his HUD. The microphone had apparently dried out just in time to annoy him with pointless captions. He groaned and hefted himself up into the trailer.

Alyx bobbed her head, singing something the suit couldn’t pick up as she set to work grabbing water and feed bowls from the cages that filled the trailer from floor to ceiling. She handed them to Gordon as she went, carefully dodging the snapping jaws of a bullsquid and ignoring the glare of a dusty looking fox and her kits. 

Gordon set the bowls out on the floor and carefully began to refill them with fresh water. These animals represented the best and least mutated of White Forest’s wildlife, and collecting them had taken weeks. Magnusson had griped constantly about their drain on their resources, but he had never even considered canceling the project.

“Can you help me with the snarks?” Alyx asked. She shoved the last of the food bowls into the seagulls’ crates and wiped her hands off on her jeans. “Noriko said the fourth nest was looking different today.”

Gordon nodded and watched her unlatch their crate. The snark inside was snoozing peacefully on its nest, its legs twitching in its sleep. Alyx stepped aside and let him pull it out, careful to get both hands around its fat body where the can opener beak couldn’t get him. It was more out of habit than real risk. Baby snarks were aggressive predators, but once they matured they switched to a scavenger’s diet.

He cradled it in his arms as Alyx began poking at its nest, checking it over for any signs of the fungal infection that had been making rounds at White Forest. It was about as big as a cat, if less flexible, and adorable. Its spiracles pulsed against his hand as it lazily snapped at his finger.

Alyx wetted a clean rag and draped it over the quivering meat of the nest, tucking it in at the edges. She held the cage open as Gordon gentled the snark back in and clicked it shut behind it.

“Everything okay?” Gordon asked.

Alyx nodded. “Noriko mistook the second trimester markings for an infection. I think. There’s not much we can do if there is a problem, aside from quarantining them in a different truck.”

She sighed and sat down, legs dangling off the tailgate, and patted the spot next to her. He sat, fiddling with the plating on his gloves.

“You know you can take that thing off, right?” She waved at his helmet. “Even the Combine avoids the rain.”

He nodded, untwisted it from the broken rubber seal and set it in his lap. The mirrored visor stared up at him, impassive. 

“I was thinking about making some modifications to the helmet when we get home,” Alyx said. “Dad thought you were going to use the text to speech more, so he didn’t put a lot of effort into making your face visible.”

“He could put more effort into making the TTS usable.” He grimaced. “The microphones break if you breathe on them funny.”

“Then breathe better, Gordon.” Alyx rolled her eyes. “There’s no TTS in the world that would actually satisfy you.”

Gordon scowled, but she was right.

“I was thinking of moving the rebreather to the back of the helmet and the valves off to the side so we can open up the visor more,” she said, tracing out a larger space around the existing glass. “Your face is hard enough to read without being able to see your mouth.”

They lapsed into silence again. Alyx jiggled her leg and played with her necklace. Behind them, the animals, Terran and Xenian alike, began to settle. The Vortigaunts were laying out faded blankets for their nest and feeding kitchen scraps to the antlions. The rain pounded on the tarp that had been pulled over the entrance.

“Gordon, be honest with me.” Alyx’s hands were slow and careful. “Do you think it’ll work?”

He didn’t have to ask what she meant. It was the reason they were here, clustered inside a shelled mall with a dozen trucks full of screeching, shitting animals instead of their cozy dorm back in White Forest.

Biodiversity. The Seven Hour War had been as deadly to the environment as it had been to humankind. Eli had told him about the bombs that had been dropped by Combine and humans alike, portal storms that had fumigated entire valleys with toxic, alien air, the forest fires set to flush out the last dregs of the Earth’s military. Entire ecosystems had been collapsed to a few species surviving in the margins.

After twenty years under Combine rule, ecologists were few and far between, but a few had made their way to White Forest with a plan. With so many niches empty, alien and invasive species could be introduced to fill the voids. The old food webs were unsalvageable, but maybe a new ecosystem could rise from the nuclear ashes, somewhere cleaner.

Alyx looked at him expectantly, waiting for an answer. Gordon had never touched a biology course in his life, but this was about more than feasibility and resource management. This was Alyx’s future. His contract would run out long before he’d get to see the impacts of this project, but Alyx would live and die in this world.

“It will work. I’d bet my life on it.”

Alyx let out a long breath and nodded. “I’ve been trying to think of ways we can expand this, if we start seeing results. Mossman said something about a seed bank in Leningrad, and If we managed to flush out a Combine ordnance factory, we could start manufacturing fertilizer.”

She sighed and kicked her legs. “Can you imagine? Farms in the Outlands?”

Gordon, who hadn’t tasted fresh fruit since he had chewed on a single musty apple in the Black Mesa break room 6 months (or 20 years) ago, nodded fervently. It would be nice to use farming equipment for its intended purpose, not just to bludgeon headcrabs.

“Barney said his parent’s farm was the size of the whole Southern Block,'' Alyx said wistfully. “And that they had a thousand cows! A thousand! What do you even do with that many?”

“Milk them, I’m guessing,” Gordon said, cracking a smile.

“Is milk any good? I’ve only ever had the weird shelf stable cream.” Alyx asked. “Barney swears it’s fantastic, but he’s kinda a shill.”

He scratched at his beard, struggling to remember. He’d never really paid attention to milk, just throwing it in his cereal and coffee. It had been… wet. And left a weird film on the roof of his mouth. With a pang, Gordon realized that he had forgotten what real dairy, not the antlion’s glowing secretions, actually tasted like.

“It was good,” Gordon lied. “Kinda thick. Tasted a little like almonds.”

“And…” Alyx fumbled for a moment, trying to remember the sign, “Cheese? The uncanned kind?”

“Salty and fatty. Smelled like bacteria, but in a good way.”

“What are you talking about cheese for? You’re starting to sound like those guys from New New Little Odessa.” Barney appeared from the shadow of the trucks and clambered up onto the tailgate. His ankle had been wrapped and he had a satchel slung over his shoulder. Someone had given him a mug of antlion milk, which he balanced primly on his leg. 

“Discussing your traumatic dairy past,” Gordon said. “The cruelties of Old America.”

Barney snorted. “Traumatic how? The cows loved me.”

“I don’t know but it had to have been for you to graduate undecided from  _ Martinson _ .”

Barney fixed Gordon with a glare. “You take that back, Freeman.”

“What’s Martinson?” Alyx asked eagerly, tasting blood in the water. 

“Agriculture school,” Gordon said. “It’s where farmers learned how to grow things. Barney couldn’t pick a major.” 

“There’s only three crops!” Alyx’s hands flew wide with glee. “How hard is it to pick one of them?”

Gordon smacked Barney’s hands before he could get a word in edgewise. “Why do you think he became a security guard in Nevada?”

Alyx rounded on Barney, shocked. “It wasn’t an innate lust for battle?”

“Maybe the natural drive to shoot headcrabs was an exaggeration.” Barney groaned and wiped his hands down his face. “Quit razzing me over an educational system that hasn’t existed for 20 years.”

“Make it harder, then,” Gordon said.

Barney rolled his eyes. “Alyxandra, make him stop.”

“Fine,” Alyx grumbled. “What brings you all the way back here?”

Barney shrugged. “Came to pick up the doc. Figured he’d want a hand with the suit.”

“Don’t worry about it.” Alyx waved him off. “I’ll do it.” 

He frowned. “Are you sure?”

“I helped build the thing!”

“I know you did, but the kids have been raiding the old stores all night and I figured you’d want your cut.” He shot her a wan smile. “They were passing some old scrunchies around.”

Alyx looked deeply conflicted. “Scrunchies? With intact elastic?”

“I can get him out just fine on my own,” Barney said, chugging the rest of the medicine and hefting his bag. “But if you don’t hurry, Mary’s gonna get all the velvet ones.”

That did it. Alyx slapped a hand to Gordon’s shoulder and fixed him with a firm look. “There are spare neck seals in my bag. If there are any cut wires or tubing, tell me. Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do!”

That was meaningless—the list of things Alyx wouldn’t do was limited to sitting still. Barney smiled as she ran off to the other side of camp where Griggs was laying out his newest finds, and turned back to Gordon. “You ready?”

The floodwater had been slowly trickling down his back for the past hour. “You cannot begin to imagine.”

Barney laughed and led him just behind one of the bigger tractor-trailers, out of the campfire’s light. With some effort he knelt and gestured for Gordon to sit in front of him.

Doffing and donning the HEV suit had always been designed as a two person task and by now the ritual was familiar, but not familiar enough—even after Black Mesa and City 17, Gordon had had weeks where taking the suit off was simply not an option.

Barney set to work undoing the clamps on the neck of the chest piece, bracing himself with one hand to get enough leverage until he could finally pry off the secondary access plate and start disconnecting the life support systems. Gordon felt a momentary spasm of panic and tried to remember if painkillers had hid anything life threatening—there had been an incident with a punctured lung and the blood oxygenator once—but nothing gave out as Barney unplugged and shut off the coolant, oxygen, and IV drugs.

From there, Barney worked down Gordon’s sides, then his arms and legs, unlatching the seams of the gauntlets and heavy force reactive plating. The outermost layer of the HEV Mark V could never completely come apart without damaging it, but with all the pins and clamps released, there was just enough wiggle room to squeeze out of it.

Barney gripped the chest piece as Gordon struggled to pull his arms out, then the boots as he wrenched his legs free, writhing inelegantly on the ground until he had managed to shed the armor in a single piece like some grotesque molting insect. Normally he might have been embarrassed, but Barney had seen him throw up over the side of the Black Mesa tram after shotgunning one too many Monsters several times and was used Gordon flailing around like an idiot.

With the armor and servos removed, it was on to the thick kevlar and lead padding underneath. Barney talked to himself as he navigated the zippers and velcro, his lips moving indistinctly. With anyone else Gordon would have been annoyed, but Barney needed to talk like most people needed to breathe. 

The hardest part of shedding the padding was navigating the tubes that passed through it to bridge Gordon’s body with the life support systems housed in the outer armor. Barney handled the clamped off tubes deftly, threading them back through the access holes. Most held clear salene, but a few were dark, still full of Gordon’s blood.

The final layer, a thin jumpsuit that only really served to wick sweat and house coolant lines, had only a single zipper. It spanned from the peripheral venous access in the crook of Gordon’s elbow, over his shoulders and down to the other access point. Barney opened it, careful not to jostle the twin catheters, and reached for his satchel. He stacked a pile of gauze and alcohol wipes on Gordon’s knee and gestured for him to hold out his arms. 

Taking the tubes out wasn’t really that bad. Alyx always went slow, but Barney did them rapid fire, pulling the second out before he could even register the first. His hands were warm through his gloves as he pressed a pad of gauze to each hole and held tight, waiting for the bleeding to stop. 

With two fresh bandaids on his arms, Gordon finally could shed the last of it. He kicked off the jumpsuit and it was all gone, leaving him standing in a thin tank top and boxers, naked like a hermit crab without its shell. The floodwater and sweat had mixed together and soaked the entire interior cavity of the suit, and Gordon shivered furiously in the draft.

Barney pulled an old, bleach-stained towel from his bag and wetted it, then set down a pile of Gordon’s clothing on the tile. He stood and gave Gordon a gentle pat on the shoulder, one that lasted maybe a moment longer than needed. “I’ll give you a minute.”

Gordon watched him go around to the other side of the truck, feeling goosebumps raise on his skinny shoulders, then set to the slow work of clearing away the grime and cleaning his wounds. Back when he had had a real job, when the HEV suit was just a bulky and invasive hazmat suit, tugging it off had only meant the end of testing, but something had changed after the Resonance Cascade. The first time in White Forest, Kleiner and Eli had prised it off—Alyx was still in the infirmary and Barney was fighting his way through the Outlands—and it had suddenly been too much, an awful blur of naked skin and heaving lungs. 

Gordon pulled on his scavenged sweatpants and City-17-issued undershirt and took a long, deep breath. He could still feel Barney’s touch, warm fingers at his neck, his shoulders, his scarred veins. He wasn’t sure it would ever stop being too much.

“Done,” he signed, rounding the corner. The suit still lay on the ground behind the truck, too heavy to move alone. “Thank you.”

Barney’s face stretched in a wide, easy grin, and he waved him over to sit next to him on a toppled column. It was nice, being alone with him. Alyx was amazing, but Barney was never quite the same around her. Always a few extra jokes, laughing a little too long, quietly shifting the attention off himself.

Gordon watched as Barney drummed his fingers against his knee, the way he always did when he hummed. A long time ago, Barney, drunk and over-affectionate, had let Gordon put his fingers to his throat to feel the vibrations.

The camp was settling in for the night. The Vortigaunts were slowly maneuvering themselves into their usual communal sleeping pile, but one of them had left two bowls of headcrab stew out, each with a generous hunk of flatbread. Scavenging must have gone well, for once. Gordon’s stomach gurgled for the first non-ration-bar meal in days, but he didn’t want to move yet.

The humans had also begun their slow migration towards the bedrolls. The trading table had been abandoned for the seats nearest the fire. Noriko was telling some war story, emphasizing the best parts with what pidgin she knew. Judging from the swing of her arms, it involved a crane and a lot of dead Combine. Alyx was next to her, wearing a new, fantastically garish vest and sewing up a hole in someone’s shirt. At the far end of the fire, Sheckley had his head on Griggs’ chest. Griggs had apparently won the jacket.

Gordon felt vaguely fascinated as he watched them. Sheckley wasn’t moving. Griggs wasn’t trying to move him. He struggled to recall if they had mentioned being related. It seemed unlikely —they looked nothing alike.

Weren’t they worried? He fidgeted with the ratty hem of his shirt, heart beating hard against his chest. It was the same feeling he got when he ran for cover, hiding until the danger passed. 

He glanced at Barney, who was watching Alyx work with a far off expression. Barney was, fundamentally, a good man. He had struck up a conversation with Gordon on his first day, had refused to switch to a paper and pen despite ASL clearly being his second language. He had always, always tried.

He nudged Barney’s shoulder and waited until he had his full attention. “Barney,” he signed, “Are Griggs and Sheckley...” He ran his middle finger through his hair.

Barney stared at him blankly.

Gordon repeated the sign, wondering if he’d finally run up against the limits of Barney’s impressive vocabulary. At another questioning look, he swished a limp wrist through the air. He was about to fingerspell it out when Barney snapped his fingers in recognition. 

Barney clapped his hands together in a handshake and flexed, the pidgin for “Established Mutual Camaraderie.”

Ah. That was it. It didn’t look like it, given that Griggs was now playing with Sheckley’s greying hair, but Gordon was no expert. Sure, he had watched as much Ellen as anyone, but maybe things had changed in the future or worse, maybe they hadn’t. 

It wasn’t his right to speculate.

They sat in silence a few minutes longer, knees knocking together, until Barney raised his hands again.

“I’m worried about Alyx.” Barney said slowly, watching Alyx drop her sewing to chase Mary around the swap table. Mary tripped and she lunged, the two of them rolling across the dirty tile until Alyx emerged victorious, scrunchy in hand. “I’m not sure how well she’s coping.”

“Coping with what?”

Barney swung his hands out expansively. “Everything. The Combine being here, the Combine being gone, managing the Resistance. I had half my life to be normal, learn to deal with things. Alyx can’t even remember living in America. Well, when it was America.”

He sighed and picked at his jacket. He was still wearing his Metrocop uniform. Against the Resistance’s colorful, scavenged outfits, he stood out like a raven in a flock of parrots. “At least City 17 was simple. You don’t need a degree to bludgeon a cop to death.”

Gordon frowned. “It helps.”

“You were the one bitching about my useless diploma.” Barney smirked at him. “At least you won’t be getting undergrad bills any time soon.”

Gordon snickered and stole a swig of sour water from Barney’s canteen. ‘I’m sure they’ll find a way.”

“Yeah,” Barney said, sobering again. “Still, you can’t shoot a mass extinction event. There’s no way to chuck a grenade at a ration shortage. I don’t know how she’s going to deal with that.”

Gordon raised an eyebrow. “With us?” 

“Not that simple,” Barney huffed. “I know you were…” His eyes glazed over. He shook his head. “...Somewhere for a long time but we weren’t. Eli’s getting older. Someone’s going to have to be the face of the revolution after him, and everyone knows Alyx is the best person for the job.”

Gordon nodded.

“Definitely. I’ve known her since we escaped Black Mesa. I practically lived with her and Eli until I joined Civil Protection,” Barney said, startling him. Barney rarely talked about the decades between the Resonance Cascade and Gordon’s return. His shoulders slumped. “I shouldn’t have gone. She needed me.”

“You did what you had to.”

Barney grimaced, his fingers twitching at the trigger of an imaginary gun. His eyes were distant, seeing something far from the warm campfire and cheerful Resistance members. “Sure.”

“You lived with Eli?” Gordon prompted, after it became clear that Barney wasn’t going to continue on his own. 

“It was good,” Barney said, face softening. “He was gentle when folks needed him, demanding when the Resistance needed us, and he always seemed like he knew what was going on, even when the Combine had us pinned.” He sighed. The fire’s light cast his frown lines in sharp shadows, and Gordon suddenly remembered how old he really was. “But I think he might have gotten the easy part of all this.”

‘We need a leader,” Barney said. “I just can’t watch Alyx tear herself apart to be one. I owe her that.”

“I won’t let that happen,” Gordon promised. He tapped his fists together, then flung them wide with sarcasm before throwing his arms into an exaggerated lambda. In the future, “Gordon Freeman saved everyone!” was apparently a common enough phrase to warrant its own sign.

Barney stared, slightly stunned, at Gordon’s horrible grin and sloppy pidgin, then burst out laughing. He laughed until there were tears at the corners of his eyes and he was bent over and wheezing into the dirty tiles. “If—" He wiped his eyes, one hand still raised. “If you say so, Gordon.”

“I do,” Gordon said with a confidence he couldn’t really feel. “Promise.”

“No reason to do it on an empty stomach.” Barney stood and dusted off his pants. “We’d never hear the end of it from the Vorts if The One Free Man snubbed their rations.”

Gordon watched Barney’s retreating back until he disappeared into the crowd, trying not to feel adrift and unmoored, failing.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Barney meets some old friends, Gordon survives his quarterly review and Alyx does a Very Bad Thing.

The storm didn’t clear out until nearly noon the next day. The caravan spent a lazy morning cleaning out the animal cages, swapping firearms and treating collected rainwater. When the clouds finally passed, Alyx helped Gordon back into the freshly cleaned and repaired HEV suit and the three of them returned to their lookout post on top of one of the trucks. 

The first few hours passed peacefully enough. The highway was relatively intact and the drivers managed to get the trucks up to a decent clip without having to worry about potholes grinding into the axles. A fat bug flew into Alyx’s mouth and sent her into a coughing fit. Barney cackled until she finally socked him in the shoulder.

Gordon finally noticed the tilt of the road when one of their water bottles rolled down the roof of the truck and vanished off the side. They had reached the once-distant mountains.

The trucks pulled over on the nearest stable piece of road to refasten cording and check that the cages hadn’t toppled over. Alyx shot finger guns at imaginary Striders wandering the peaks while Barney pestered Gordon about living in Innsbruck. The Carpathians weren’t the Alps, but their snow covered peaks still made something twinge in Gordon’s chest.

He was halfway through describing his grad student caffeine addiction to a fascinated Alyx and a deeply concerned Barney when he smelled it. Ozone. Gordon looked around wildly, trying to find the storm clouds. There was no cover in the mountains and a rainstorm they couldn’t outrun could easily turn deadly. 

Something burned in the corner of his eye—a flash of light, the Resistance member working on the rearmost truck running for cover—and Gordon was already grabbing his crowbar and the nearest gun. The wind shifted, and he could taste iron with an undercurrent of ash and burning meat. It was the smell of pulse rifles and vaporized civilians. Combine troops.

Gordon vaulted himself off the truck, ignoring the ladder entirely. His boots hit the asphalt hard, and he immediately ducked behind a wheel as a round of pulse rifle shots hammered into the side of the truck.

He peeked out from behind the tire, finger on the trigger, and watched a thin, red-hot piece of rebar embed itself in the Combine Elite’s helmet. Another bolt whizzed by as they fell to the ground. Alyx must have held their sniper’s nest while he took point. God rarely watched over Gordon’s travels, but one of the Vances was usually up to the task.

Smoke belched from the tailpipes of the trucks as the drivers desperately gunned their ancient engines. Gordon felt his cover vibrate as it backfired. The eighteen wheelers had taken half an hour to start that morning and they were stalling again.

The Combine could be outrun, if they could run. Their nest had enough RPGs to sink Breen’s entire Gunship honor guard, but that meant nothing if they were sitting still. A stray spray of gunshot could render their cargo and weeks of work useless.

They needed time to flee. They needed a distraction and there was only one person in the convoy wearing a bulletproof suit of armor. 

Gordon took a deep breath, checked that his magazine was full and ran out into the fire fight. The suit picked up the meaty thuds of pulse rifle fire and the clatter of Resistance shotguns alike as he wove across the highway, ducking under stun batons and spraying bullets into the Combine platoon. The suit blared alarms as a shot cut through his shoulder, but any pain was swiftly silenced by a dose of morphine. He rammed the butt of his gun into the lens of a Combine’s mask and paused as the SMG’s empty magazine clicked fruitlessly.

No time to reload, not out in the open with a dozen Combine tripping over themselves to get to him. Gordon sighed, drew his crowbar and threw the nearest Trooper to the floor by their bulletproof vest. No matter how much padding you put on the inside of a gas mask, nothing could stand between a fascist’s skull and Gordon’s crowbar.

Once, sitting around a campfire, Alyx had called him a torpedo with a PHD. It had been apt. Gordon’s mind had more in common with a freight train than most people, allowing him to smash through almost any obstacle with overwhelming force on his journey from point A to point B. There was no fear of violence, no instinctual recoil to the sight of grey matter decorating asphalt if it meant he could progress to the next arbitrary objective. The neurologists at Black Mesa had been torn between a childhood brain injury unlocking some innate killer programming or some horrific genetic anomaly giving him instinctual firearms expertise, but the cause didn’t change the overall effect. TV static played in Gordon’s mind as he waded through gunfire and Combine, his crowbar smashing through armor and flesh with inhuman strength. 

Gordon had lost count of the corpses. He could smell burning kevlar as the Combine accidentally shot each other in their eagerness to hit him. He wrenched his crowbar from one body and swung the curved end into another torso, flinging them to the ground as the metal caught on the armor or a rib. The hook slipped free and found a neck. Gordon grabbed them in a chokehold and used the body as a shield against another round of gunfire. The corpse fell, fat sputtering around the bullet holes, and Gordon struck out again and again. It was easier than breathing, once you found the right tempo. In and out, watch your six, over and over.

Someone grabbed him a headlock, plated forearm digging hard into the padding on his neck. Gordon struggled to breathe against it as the HUD flared warnings—blood oxygen decreasing, suit power low, contusions detected, internal bleeding detected—and gasped as his crowbar was knocked out of his hands. A Metrocop stalked towards him, finger on the trigger of their rifle.

Gordon felt his teeth rattle as a hail of rifle fire sliced through the Metrocop, cutting neat holes in their skull, their heart, their hold on the gun. More shots burned through the air, and the Elite that had grabbed him collapsed in a heap of armor and strangely-colored blood. He scrambled for his crowbar, scanning the road for any more Combine, any more targets, but there was only an empty highway and a trail of corpses. The woods had gone still, and no more Combine surged from the undergrowth. He finally turned to where the trucks had been and saw Barney and Alyx running down the road, a mounted Vortigaunt on their heels.

Gordon snatched his crowbar from where it had fallen and felt a fresh surge of adrenaline race through him. One Vortigaunt was nothing, but they always traveled in packs. Gordon ran forward, ready for another battle.

**[HAS THE FREEMAN SUSTAINED GREAT INJURY]** scrolled across the bottom of the HUD.  **[PERMIT US TO RECHARGE YOUR CELLS]**

Gordon stopped short, his crowbar bouncing off the asphalt. He paused as the Vortigaunt’s electricity washed over him, suddenly grateful no one could see his face behind the helmet. Shame burned in his chest. The Vortigaunts had sacrificed more for him and the Resistance than he could imagine. They had saved him and Alyx when no one else could, over and over.

“The convoy’s fine,” Alyx signed, hopping over the piles of corpses with an athlete’s grace. A crossbow and quiver bounced happily on her back. “We saw them reach the next pass, no trouble.”

“Christ, Gordon, wait for us next time,” Barney said, panting. He paused, glancing at the awful mural of blood and sinew spread across the pavement, and whistled. “You really went ham, huh?” 

Gordon looked down at the nearest body. The mask had been knocked away in the scuffle, revealing a pile of meat that had maybe once been a woman’s face. Her jaw had been crushed by the crowbar, but her eyes had been spared. They were foggy but focused, and it was only now he noticed her hands moving, reaching for something among the blood and pavement. She locked eyes with him and her broken jaw moved, gasping something Gordon could never hear.

The stun baton came down hard and heavy on her skull, arcing electricity. Barney held it there for a long moment, the lightning reflecting in his cold, distant eyes. Her hands jittered and went limp, grasping for nothing. It was only now that Gordon noticed her uniform. It was the same black and white padding as Barney’s armor. Metrocop, not a trooper.

Barney holstered the stolen baton on his belt as if nothing had happened. “Bastard. Whoever’s sending these guys, they must be getting desperate. Transhumans hate a mixed platoon.”

Alyx’s reached for his arm, but he just shot her a strange look and pulled away. Alyx jerked her head towards the Metrocop and mouthed something Gordon couldn’t read, and Barney shook his head, expression suddenly guarded. His fingers tapped the grip of the stun baton in a well practiced pattern as he turned away to survey the carnage.

Alyx sighed, rubbing her temples, and kicked one of the Elites onto their back. She knelt to inspect something in the grooves of their armor and frowned. “They’re not starving. This one’s been fed recently.”

Gordon tilted his head. 

“Do you remember the ports on the Stalkers’ stomachs?” Alyx asked, her hands small and slow. “They do a similar surgery on the Transhuman Wing, and they...” she paused, looking for the right words, then settled on a claw grip over her belly and a wicked, twisting rip away from herself. “They can last a few days on their own, but they need Combine tech to eat.”

“There’ll be a base nearby,” Barney agreed. “Who knows how many of them are squirreled away there.”

Alyx frowned. “Do you think the convoy can outrun them?”

Barney shrugged. “Hard to tell when we don’t even know where they are. They’ll be coming, it’s just a matter of time. We’ll have to deal with them on the way back, and by then they’ll have time to set up a real ambush.”

He paused and looked to Alyx, patiently waiting for her decision.

Her brow furrowed as she fidgeted with her necklace. She sighed and squared her shoulders, and when she signed, it was with a firm, authoritative hand. “We need to clear out their base. We can’t let them get to the animals. They’re too valuable.”

The Vortigaunt looked down at them from their mount, which was chewing on the arm of a dead Trooper. They stroked their chin, secondary eyes blinking slowly in consideration.  **[AGAIN IT IS OUR DUTY TO SEND THE FREEMAN AND HIS COMPATRIOTS OFF]**

Alyx huffed and pulled her hair back from where it had gotten loose from her headband. “Clear out a mall full of headcrabs, raze a Combine base, there’s always something.”

**[IT IS NEEDED FOR THE CARAVAN TO PREVAIL]** They shrugged, reins bouncing in their grip.  **[SO TWISTS THE VORTAL COIL]**

The Vortigaunt beckoned Gordon over with a long claw. Gordon carefully picked his way through the bodies, only pausing to grab his crowbar. They placed a single hand on the visor of his helmet. Gordon stood still, feeling very short as he looked up into their soft red eyes.

**[THE FREEMAN WILL TRAVEL FAR FROM OUR INFLUENCE ON THIS ERRAND]** He watched the captions load and slowly scroll on his HUD.  **[IT IS OUR HAND THAT BINDS YOUR EMPLOYER]**

Gordon felt his heart skip a beat and shot a worried glance at Barney and Alyx, wondering if they had heard. His contract seemed to slide from people’s thoughts like water. The Vortigaunt gave him a quiet, pitying look.  **[THE CALHOUN AND THE ALYX VANCE MUST STAY CLOSE FOR WE ARE NOT THE ONLY CORDS THAT BIND YOU HERE]**

Gordon nodded and pressed the pads of his fingers to the chin of his helmet and brought his hand down and out. The Vortigaunts didn’t have the hands to speak ASL, but they knew what “thank you” looked like. He had had too much to thank them for, lately.

**[IT IS OUR PLEASURE]** The Vortigaunt clasped their hands together and set their third grasper on top, their own sign of thanks. **[WE HAVE ALWAYS REMAINED COTERMINOUS]**

Gordon stared at where they had disappeared around the bend long after the antlion had galloped away. 

Alyx nudged his shoulder gently. “How’re you holding up?”

Gordon knew he had too much morphine in his system to trust his nerves. He glanced at the HUD display’s long list of ailments. “Health 69%. Power 23%.”

She grimaced and grabbed his arm, flicking open the access panel with her thumb to shove a vial of luminescent green fluid into the gauntlet. Gordon shivered as the alien drugs worked their way through his system, knitting damaged flesh back together. The percentages on the HUD ticked higher. 

Barney clapped him on the back and knelt next to one of the fallen Metrocops. Gordon and Alyx watched with grim fascination as he reached around to the back of the officer’s head and undid some hidden latch, then yanked the mask and hood unceremoniously off the body. Barney looked into the neck of the mask and grimaced. “Alyx, gimme some alcohol wipes. We’ve got work to do.”

The climb up to the base was an easy hike. The Combine had forged a wide path on their trek through the foothills and what was left of the forest was mostly withered old fir trees and low lying brush. The wind cut easily through it, and more than once Alyx and Barney had hid behind Gordon’s armor to avoid the gusts. Occasionally, Barney paused to listen for something the HEV suit never picked up, shook his head, and continued their climb.

They saw their first Combine long after the highway had slipped out of sight. A concrete box had been built into the side of the mountain, and a Trooper had been posted on the roof. They stood ramrod straight with a rifle in hand, guarding the heavy access door set into the concrete. Fog puffed softly from the vents of their mask, fading into the cold mountain air.

The three of them crouched behind an enormous rotting log, watching the soldier stare impassively at the dead forest. Gordon readied his gun, but Barney forced the barrel back down.

“Only one of us is bulletproof, Gordon,” Barney said. “If it dies, its radio goes off and the whole camp will come running. We’re going to have to find another way in.”

Alyx unclipped the crossbow from her strap and set it down on top of the log. She peered through the scope. “Or we could just shoot the radio. Tell me where it is.”

“Great idea,” Barney agreed. “On the Troopers, I think it’s on the right chest.”

Alyx paused her tampering with the bow’s focus. “More specific, Barney. Above or below the clavicle?”

Barney gestured to a point just above his collarbone.

Alyx set her jaw and slotted a fresh bolt into the bow. She licked her finger to check the wind, carefully adjusted the aim and fired, sending a red hot spike of metal slicing through the air and into the chest of the Combine.

They scrambled for the pulse rifle, but another bolt pierced the lens of their mask before they could reach the trigger. The Trooper was dead before they hit the ground. The three of them watched as they fell limply from their post and ragdolled down the steep hill.

Alyx reloaded again, and they waited with bated breath for the glint of white gas masks and the burn of rifle fire. 

The HEV suit didn’t pick up the whine of a Combine death signal or radio chatter. Barney and Alyx made no sign of hearing anything. Another minute passed, and nothing came. 

Barney pushed himself to his feet and slowly walked up the hill, rifle raised. Gordon and Alyx followed, watching the woods for any other guards. A cold wind blew through the clearing, stirring the yellow grass and whipping up dust.

Alyx pressed an ear to the door and shut her eyes, listening. She pulled away and began checking the module on the wall next to it. “I don’t hear anyone coming, but I’m not sure how long it’ll take me to hack in. The program looks different than the door locks in City 17.”

“Don’t worry about hacking it,” Barney said and peeled off his glove. “Something tells me Breen forgot to remove me from the guest list.”

Barney’s hands were rough and calloused, but everyone’s looked like that in the future. What stood out more was the tattoo on the inside of his left wrist. The Combine script and lines of numbers had gone blue and blurry with time, but the strange square full of boxes was still sharp and dark. He shoved the tattoo under the reader and smiled sharply as the module flashed green. They were in.

Barney pulled the thick gloves back on, smoothing them carefully over his sleeves and flexing his fingers to check the fit, then drew the Metrocop’s mask from his bag. He put it on like a second skin, his fingers easily finding the hidden latches and straps behind the faceplate. All it took was a few buckles and his friend was gone, replaced by an urban bogeyman.

“Don’t give me that look, Gordon,” Barney said. It was strange seeing him sign without his face. It was always in motion, his bright grin and thick eyebrows punctuating every question and snide remark. Without his expressions, the words felt hollow. “I spent a decade playing professional bootlicker. This is nothing.” 

Gordon bit his cheek and grabbed the doorknob. The door swung open easily into an empty hallway. Barney took point, walking through the windowless, musty corridor with the rigid stride of a Metrocop as Alyx and Gordon ducked from shadow to shadow behind him. The architecture was definitely pre-war, maybe an old military base, but the Combine had made it their own. The familiar City-17 locks were rigged on every door, and the cold, blue metal of the Citadel cut through the hallway at odd angles, as unnatural and inhuman as its architects. 

Alyx grabbed Gordon’s arm and dragged him into the nearest doorframe. Ahead, the hallway opened up into an enormous room. Any trace of its former function was long gone. Now, row after row of thin mats and blankets covered every inch of floor space. Metrocops in faded and tattered uniforms laid on them, resting, or paced the aisles. All of them wore masks, even the sleeping ones, save for a few in the corner who had pulled theirs up just high enough to chew on some ration bars.

Gordon strained against the instinct to reach for his gun. It was more Metrocops than he had ever seen in one place. If they blocked the doors, a few grenades could take them all out.

Alyx caught the glint in his eye and gave him a sympathetic pat on the back. “Not now. Dealing with the Transhumans comes first.”

He raised his eyebrows. “How?”

She fidgeted with her necklace, thinking. “The supply system and feeding tubes will be protected. You can deal with guards, but if they have shields up it’ll be impossible to get in and smash it.”

“You’ll need to cut the power first,” Barney agreed. “That’ll distract them and turn off the shields. Then we can go break down the machinery.”

Alyx grimaced. “You make it sound so easy.”

“There should be a control room somewhere in there that manages the whole base’s power supply,” Barney said, shooting an anxious glance at the swarm of Combine just inside. “Get in the vents and follow me. I’ll signal if I spot something.”

“We’ll have your back,” Alyx promised. “Stay safe.”

“I’ll be fine,” He said, pulling his shoulders back into the familiar, stiff-backed posture of a Civil Protection officer. “Just like bootcamp.”

Alyx drove her EMP tool into the lock and pushed the door open. The room was empty save for a few filing cabinets and some abandoned furniture, and a thin layer of cobwebs covered everything. Alyx coughed into her sleeve as Gordon pried open the grate in the wall and sent a cloud of dust into the air.

He gave one last glance to the Metrocop at the door before he hoisted himself into the vent, Alyx just behind him. The scrape of his HEV suit against the claustrophobic walls was intimately familiar to Gordon. He was even more of an expert on vents than elevators. They had never been safe, but there was a sort of comfort in knowing the exact menaces that plagued the average HVAC system: headcrabs, manhacks and black mold. 

The shaft rose up and up until it finally evened out over the barracks and the solid floor gave way to grates. Gordon grimaced as he searched the herd of identical uniforms and blank masks. Barney had vanished into the faceless crowd. If the vent fell and a fire fight broke out, there would be no way to tell friend from foe. 

**[I SEE HIM HE'S THE ONE WITH THE STAINED PANTS IN THE THIRD ROW]** Alyx nudged his leg.  **[KEEP GOING BEFORE WE FALL BEHIND]**

He nodded and pushed ahead. 

The shaft sloped back down from the high ceiling of the barracks to a hallway. Combine bustled past underneath them, pushing carts of rations and munitions. Alyx squeezed his ankle as a Metrocop passed beneath them and he breathed a sigh of relief. Barney was back, and Gordon pushed on, struggling to keep up with his quick steps without alerting the guards.

The hallway turned right and the grates closed up, and for a heart pounding minute Gordon was sure they had lost him, but the slats in the floor eventually reappeared and he could see Barney waiting for them in a doorway. There was hardly any traffic this far from the main arteries of the base, and Barney risked a brief, sharp nod to the ceiling.

Gordon was about to try and get closer when Alyx grabbed his leg. He drew back as a Metrocop stepped out of a sideroom. The cop froze, glanced frantically up and down the hall, and ran to Barney.

He held his breath as they embraced, thick armor bumping awkwardly together. The Metrocop pulled away, hands on Barney's shoulders, and Gordon knew from the bob of their head they were talking. He stifled a groan and fiddled with the controls of his gauntlet, turning up the microphone’s sensitivity to try to catch their conversation.

The software calibrated for a long moment, and suddenly there were words scrolling across the bottom of the HUD.  **[NEVER SAID YOU MADE IT OUT OF CITY 17]**

**[NEARLY DIDN’T]** Barney clapped his hands on the Metrocop’s arms and Gordon wondered if he was smiling under his mask, if it was a lie. The captions stuttered, failing to cut through the Combine voice filters, then popped back on again.  **[THROUGH AN ENTIRE TERRORIST BLOCK BEFORE THE ELITES FOUND ME]**

**[I CAN’T BELIEVE THEY DIDN’T TELL US THE WHOLE UNIT WAS LOOKING FOR YOU]** The Metrocop shook their head, still holding tight to Barney.  **[I GOT STUCK LUGGING THE CATERPILLAR AROUND]**

**[DON’T CALL IT THAT THE TRANSHUMANS WOULD GIVE YOU HELL]**

The Metrocop finally let go and gave Barney a gentle shove.  **[I’M RIGHT AREN’T I]**

He folded his arms, the picture of Combine loyalty.  **[THE ELITES DON’T SEE IT THAT WAY]**

The Metrocop’s shoulders rose and fell. Gordon recognized it as laughter.  **[HARD TO WHEN YOU’VE HAD YOUR SENSE OF HUMOR SURGICALLY REMOVED]**

That got a laugh out of Barney, and they were holding each other again, stumbling around the empty hallway. 

Barney had hugged him and Alyx and Eli like that when he had gotten home, had buried his face in Gordon’s shoulder while Alyx clung to him like a barnacle in the middle of the White Forest lobby. Something jagged twisted in Gordon’s chest. He wasn’t sure what was more unsettling: the idea that Barney could conjure that joy on a whim and fake it so effectively, or that some part of it could be sincere.

**[IT’S GOOD TO HAVE YOU BACK]** The Metrocop paused and looked him up and down, the lenses of their mask flashing in the flood lights. **[WHAT’S LEFT OF THE UNIT MEETS UP FOR CARDS WHEN THE ELITES CHANGE SHIFT THEY’D KILL ME IF I DIDN’T GET YOU]** They looped an arm around Barney’s shoulder and began to walk down the hall. Barney didn’t resist, dropping into the same easy stride. **[YOU CAN HEAR ALL ABOUT XJ-34’S FAVORITE RAIDS]**

**[IS HE STILL GOING ON ABOUT SHELLING THAT TOWER BLOCK]**

**[NO ITS THE MOST OBSCURE CHARGES HE’S EVER CAUGHT SOMEONE ON I HOPE YOU MEMORIZED YOUR PUBLIC CONDUCT LAWS]**

Barney’s shoulders shook and Gordon watched the two Metrocops walk away, his finger itching for the trigger of the gun, knowing it was pointless. A shot to the back of the neck wouldn’t get them to the control room. Barney might even resent him for it. It was a strange thought, being disliked for killing people, and it unsettled him.

One of the cops raised a hand behind their back. Through the slats of the grating, he saw him make a thumbs-down and flick it out into a flat hand—the Resistance pidgin for “Go on without me.”

Gordon waited until they were long gone before moving forward. The vent plunged back into darkness, twisting and turning through the facility until it finally stopped at a dead end over a stairwell. He was about to try negotiating backing up in the cramped vent when Alyx gave his ankle another squeeze.

**[GET OUT HERE]**

Gordon shimmied his crowbar out and wedged it in the gap between the vent and rusted grating. It came loose easily, and he carefully dropped himself into the empty corridor, Alyx close on his heels.

“If they didn’t have it near the barracks, the next best bet is they put the control room deeper in the mountain,” Alyx signed, already running down the stairs. “If they’re shielding it like that, it has to be in charge of something big.”

Gordon nodded and let Alyx take point, creeping behind her with his SMG as she sniped cameras with her pistol. It was almost like they were back in the ruined Citadel. The walls were almost entirely made of the Combine’s strange metal, threaded through with enormous bunches of cables and sinewy tubing. The air was humid and stagnant, and Gordon felt the HEV suit’s cooling system kick in as they followed the hallway deeper into the mountain.

Alyx stopped in front of a door labeled in the strange combination of cyrillic and Combine script that seemed endemic to City 17. She reloaded her pistol, plugging in a fresh magazine, and counted down out loud. Gordon watched her mouth move and on one, kicked the door down.

The four Troopers manning the control room turned to them in unison, their hands reaching for their holstered rifles, but Gordon was fast and Alyx was a better shot. The fight lasted moments. At point blank, the SMG tore through their masks like paper and Alyx’s bullets sliced through the chinks in their heavy armor.

Alyx locked the door and shoved the dead Trooper off the console, grimacing as the body smeared blood across the keys. She slid into the controller’s seat and set to work, her hands flying over the buttons and dials. The blue light of the monitor made the shadows under her eyes look even darker. “Let’s get this over with, before Barney gets in too deep.”

Gordon tilted his fist in agreement and began rifling through the soldiers’ pockets. Pulse rifle ammo, spare Medkit vials, nothing else. Transhumans never kept personal effects.

“It’d be just our luck if he got suckered into playing mole again right after he got out of the CP,” she signed and typed a few more lines of code on the console’s sprawling keyboard. She pulled her EMT tool from her pocket and jammed the prongs into a port. A loading screen appeared on the monitor. “Last thing I need is him disappearing for another decade. If we needed any more thousand yard stares around White Forest, I’d start recruiting Scanners.”

Her hands were quick and light, joking, but her smile was strained. 

Gordon frowned and grabbed one of the toppled chairs. He checked the lock on the door and sat next to her. He raised his hands, unsure of how to broach the subject, unsure if he could. Gordon had always stuffed his feelings in a sack and buried it in the proverbial backyard. Black Mesa, the Citadel, Seattle, Barney’s dimples, it could all be broken down and shoved aside. 

He squared his shoulders and took a deep breath. He’d promised Barney he would help Alyx. Gordon Freeman saved everyone.

“It’s okay,” Gordon said, fumbling for common ground. “I’m worried about him too.”

Alyx sighed. “Barney’s spent the better part of a decade playing Combine. He knows what he’s doing.”

“Still.”

“Yeah, I’m worried,” she admitted, her motions tired and slow. “I don’t like him being undercover—it scares me. Barney scares me too, when he’s with them.” She shook her head at Gordon’s alarmed look and shoved a chip into the console’s now open access port. “Not like that. Just… I think he forgets himself.”

“What did he do in Civil Protection?” Gordon asked. It was cowardly to go through Alyx for information, but Gordon knew he was weak for Barney, that he’d let him talk him in circles if he tried to be direct.

“I wish I could tell you.” She pulled away from the controls and ran a hand through her frizzy hair. “He only ever gave me the intel I needed for missions. I’m not sure how much he even shared with dad. Probably thought he was protecting me.”

Gordon nodded and she pocketed her EMP tool, something unexpectedly bitter flitting across her face. “I’m probably going to lead us, someday. I don’t know how he can believe that but still think I can’t handle knowing how many bodies he buried for Breen.”

A prompt window opened on the monitor and commands flew down it at breakneck pace as the code executed. Gordon could feel the vibrations of the building, all the pipework and machinery and electronics, slowing and dimming and dying. 

“He used to be better. Told me about every citizen he snuck off the train to Nova Prospekt, brought me the best contraband from the station.” She smiled. “Whenever he went off to his shift, there was this look in his eye, like he was ready to fight all of Overwatch and win.”

That was the Barney he had known months and decades ago, easy smiles and rambling stories, eyes like an open book. It wasn’t the man who had led them out of City 17. 

“What happened?”

“He never said, but it was sudden. One day he came back to the lab and just…” She paused, struggling to find the words. “I can’t say he gave up. He did everything he could for us. But when he was off duty, he… wasn’t the same.” Her shoulders slumped. “Maybe he just gave up on himself.”

Gordon didn’t know what to say to that, so he said nothing, hands useless and silent at his sides. 

Alyx shook her head and pulled the chip from the computer. The monitor suddenly went dark, and a moment later the lights were out, plunging them into darkness save for the thin beam of Gordon’s flashlight. She stood, stretched, and pulled out her pistol. “That should knock out the force fields, the alarms, everything. Want the honors?”

She waved at the glittering keys and dead lights of the control panel. Gordon drew his crowbar, desperate for something he understood. 

The servos in the suit’s arms hummed when he brought the crowbar smashing down onto the console. Buttons and LEDs went flying as he raked it across the panel. He caught the edge of the panel and threw all his weight down onto the crowbar until the entire thing vibrated with tension and the casing finally popped off, laying the computer free for him to enact vengeance upon. Gordon let himself sink into the effortless momentum of it, the simple rhythm of carnage.

“Let’s see them try to reboot that,” Alyx said, kicking at the shrapnel that had once been a computer. She drew her gun and slowly nudged the door to the hall open with her knee.

Gordon yanked her back by the scruff of her jacket as the door was nearly blown off its hinges by pulse rifle fire. He grunted as the rounds burned into the HEV suit, and emptied a clip into the helmet of the Elite posted just outside the door.

The Elite stumbled for a second, their shots going wide and leaving pockmarks in the walls, and Gordon seized the opening, kicking them down and driving the hook of his crowbar into the meat of their neck. He pulled it loose only when they stopped twitching. Elites were bad at staying dead.

Alyx shook his shoulder and pointed down the hall. More Combine were running down the stairs, their ghostly masks glinting in the beam of the flashlight. Alyx knocked a few down with a flurry of quick shots, but there were too many to make a stand against. A firefight would be lethal in such a cramped space. Gordon took off at a run, Alyx close behind him.

The entire base had gone dark and still, from the floodlights down to the power stations. Gordon took turns blindly, scrambling around the corners and firing into the dark whenever he thought he spotted the glint of a mask’s lenses. The halls occasionally lit up with muzzle fire from behind, the white-hot light of a dark energy ball burning his retinas as they dived out of its path. 

The Combine were gaining on them. When Gordon risked a glance back, he saw that the mob was growing as soldiers and cops spilled from their posts to get a piece of Vance Subprime and Anticitizen One. There was only so long they could outrun them. 

He took a hard left, then a right, weaving across the hallway and praying the sudden turn would buy them some time. There was a stairwell up ahead, and Gordon knew they had no choice but to descend. Going deeper into enemy territory was a stupid move, but their backs were against the wall. .

Alyx vaulted the guard rail and leapt to the next landing. Gordon raced to keep up with her as she flew down the stairs, glancing back over his shoulder every few seconds for Combine. The HUD’s captioning was scrolling gunfire and footstep warnings, but the software gave no indication of direction, volume or content outside of the vaguest canned descriptions. With his hands occupied with his gun, there was no way to ask Alyx, to make some plan of attack. All they could do was run.

The stairwell ended in another dark corridor. Gordon’s flashlight caught on the reflective patches of a Metrocop’s uniform and he lined up the shot on instinct.

Alyx dove for him and the bullets missed their target, instead embedding themselves in one of the pipes running along the ceiling. Gordon lowered his gun immediately—Alyx didn’t make mistakes, not on the battlefield—and finally saw what her keen eyes had picked out in the dark.

The Metrocop’s uniform was faded, with dark water stains up to his knees, still damp even after they had been laid out in front of the fire all night. Gordon knew that if he turned around, he would see the patches Barney had sewn in to cover the bullet holes. 

Gordon breathed a sigh of relief and ran for him. He could feel the thud of boots behind him, see the flash of white gas masks in the corner of his eye, but maybe Barney had a plan. Maybe the three of them could fight all of Overwatch and win.

He was fifteen feet away when he noticed Barney’s hand moving, reaching for his gun. Ten feet away when Barney raised the muzzle and took aim. Five when the slug of hot plasma sliced effortlessly through the side of his suit, expertly hitting the tiny chink between the plates of force reactive armor. 

He skidded to a stop, stunned, and then the alerts started and something gave out. The world tilted around him, too bright and too dark all at once, and Gordon fell to the ground, vision swimming. The shot had never met flesh, but he could feel blood pooling in the armor and leaking out onto the concrete floor. His HUD flashed warnings, screaming about a compromised life support system and major blood loss. Alyx was shaking him until suddenly she wasn’t. In the corner of his eye, he could see her running, her hands covered in his blood.

His heart was beating fast, too fast, and all he could focus on were the warnings on the HUD, instructing him to seek a mechanic and a medic, in that order. Time blurred and ran together as he tried to parse the wall of text with its vasopressors and symptom lists and by the time he finally gave up, Combine soldiers were dragging him down the corridor, a trail of blood marking their path. They hadn’t put a bullet through his skull. Yet. 

He had been here before, bleeding out as the HECU dragged him on a victory lap through Black Mesa. Maybe this time they would get it right, shoot him before they tossed his body in with the garbage.

Gordon shook himself and winced as the Combine dragging him slammed him into a wall in retribution. Black Mesa was on the other side of the world, buried under a mountain of radioactive rubble. He couldn’t lose himself to the fog.

He shut his eyes, trying to will away the lightheadedness that fizzed behind his eyelids. It helped to imagine he was somewhere else, somewhere better. If he focused, he could imagine the musty taste of the Combine’s base was the smell of salt and seaweed. He envisioned clean white beaches, an unsullied coast ringing an enormous, crystal blue sea. Barney in a pair of lambda-print swim trunks, dozing with his feet in unirradiated water. Alyx splashing through the waves with her pants rolled up over her knees, chasing real, living minnows through the shallows. There would be seabirds overhead and an unpolluted sky and the world would be good, unpoisoned.

He clung tight to that promise, holding onto it with his eyes screwed shut as the Combine dragged him up a flight of stairs and threw him across the floor. When he opened them again, the corridor was gone and he was lying on his stomach someplace dark and cold and dirty. The plating of the HEV suit dug into his side as he struggled through the cotton in his brain.

He forced himself off his belly and onto his side, wincing as the world lurched around him. The flashlight on his chest flickered and illuminated the room in a narrow cone. He was in a cell, and through the metal bars he could see the back of an Elite’s head. If they were talking, he wouldn’t know. The HUD’s software had glitched again. Gibberish scrolled across the bottom of his visor, competing with alerts and saline administration reports for space.

Gordon grimaced and ran a hand blindly up his side. There was a deep gouge in the plating, and he could feel severed tubes and melted wiring as he dug his finger into the crevice. When he pulled his hand away, his glove was dyed red.

He struggled to remember Dr. Cross’s lectures on the HEV suit’s design, but he was a theoretical physicist, not an engineer. He wished Alyx was there. She would know exactly what to do, what wires to connect and tubes to clamp. They’d already be out of this dingy military cell.

He groaned and hefted himself up to sit against the wall. The hole in his suit was still leaking blood onto the tile, but it had slowed to a sluggish trickle. He tried to stand, but his head spun and the suit weighed him down. Again, he was trapped by the enemy, separated from his friends in a force reactive coffin. Gordon settled against the cinderblock wall and waited, watching the Elite guarding him out of the corner of his eye and trying to pace his breathing.

He wasn’t sure how much time passed. The system clock had been damaged by Barney’s shot and had vanished from his HUD. He tried to keep his focus and count the cracks in the tile, but occasionally he blinked and found himself lying on the floor or slumped in a different position against the wall, missing time. He didn’t dream, but sometimes when he woke, he could feel the dull twang of something in his chest, like he had pressed his heart against a vibrating guitar string.

Barney and Alyx hadn’t come yet.

It was strange, feeling so far from the Resistance. Ever since the man in the suit had thrown him into the future, they had been there in one way or another, ushering him through the apartment blocks or leading him through the canals. Even riding through the lonely miles of Highway 17, he had found them. The medkits and ammo stashed away on the beach had saved his life more times than he could count, but it was the lambda painted over the caches that had really kept him going. Someone had traveled the same road as him, had sacrificed valuable supplies for the mere hope of helping another refugee or rebel.

Then the Uprising had happened, the Citadel, the escape from City 17 and the journey through the Outlands. Entire squads of Resistance members fighting alongside him, Griggs and Sheckley reassuring him in the mines, the Vortigaunts saving Alyx’s life. And after all the carnage and running, they had finally made it to White Forest. Kleiner and Eli in the lab, D0G racing with him through the Outlands, countless rebels inviting him to sit and talk with them in rapid fire pidgin. Barney’s head on his chest when he dozed off watching Alyx tamper with her blueprints in their shared room. There was always someone.

The blood on the tile had dried. Gordon ran a finger through it and wiped it on his thigh. Maybe after all that, he was going to die isolated and alone, just like his mother had always worried. 

Something in his chest thrummed, snapping back and forth like piano wire. Gordon hissed through his teeth and clawed uselessly at the chest plate of the HEV suit. The thing twisted and pulled, looped and vibrated, drawing itself into some unfathomable cat’s cradle, a snare ready to spring and capture.

A distant rumble shook the room, and the Elite jolted to attention. Gordon shot a glance at them as they ran out of the room, but there were more pressing matters. The feeling of hands in his chest, plucking at his nerves and veins, was getting stronger and Gordon stumbled to his feet as a fresh jolt of adrenaline shot through him. He knew that sensation, the tying of his Vortal Chords, had felt it as he stepped off the tram into the void, in the Citadel as he dangled in a coffin. A contract.

No wonder the Combine had left him alive. There was still a bid on his soul.

Gordon scrambled to the door of his cell and fumbled with the Combine lock through the bars. If he had a pistol, his crowbar, anything, he could tear through it, try to escape the thing chasing him, but the Combine had stolen his gun and crowbar. He scanned his cell for a tool, something to make his escape with, but there was nothing but dust and mold.

He was about to start pointlessly trying to bend the bars apart when the lock sparked and disengaged. Gordon stared through the bars, ready to see Alyx and her smile at the console, and felt his throat close up.

Bright blue eyes. A hand reaching up to adjust an already perfect tie. Gordon’s head swam, the world spun, and he knew this was no mannequin.

His employer stood inhumanly still in the hallway, stiff-necked and leering from the crossroads. Gordon’s feet moved with a mind of their own. The HEV suit’s heavy boots dragged across the base’s tile, but his head was in the Black Mesa tram, hurtling through the black. His ticket had run out. Finally, this was his place to get off.

The man in the suit smiled, and his thin lips stretched independently of the skin around them. He raised his hands, and when he signed, it was perfectly fluent and completely expressionless. “Finally, a chance to speak in person. It has been quite some time, hasn’t it?”

Gordon found himself nodding. The air tasted like ozone and ash.

“In light of recent events, it seems that appropriate that we,” the man paused, staring at Gordon as he sucked in air through his mouth, “renegotiate your contract, Gordon Freeman.”

His name sent a fresh jolt of dread through Gordon. The sign he had used wasn’t Barney’s nickname, the Vortigaunts’ title or the pidgin lambda, but the one his long-dead teacher had given him in first grade, plucked from the past and twisted by his employer. 

Something choked and wordless worked its way up his throat, desperate and pleading for someone, anyone. He didn’t care if the Combine heard, a bullet would be more merciful than another jump forward. Twenty more years and everyone he had ever known would be gone. He couldn’t do it again, dig his nails into a senseless future and try to root himself to it. It was a fight he had no hope of winning.

Instinct moved him like a rabbit fleeing a wolf. Gordon bolted, shoving past the man in the suit and barreling down the hall. He could feel the man’s hold on his chords tighten, pulling him in like a fish on a line, but he couldn’t stop.

The hallways flicked by in a blur of Citadel metal and prewar concrete. The world churned around him, either from shock or the twisting of the thing in the suit, but Gordon pushed on, letting the servos of the armor bear the weight when his legs gave out. 

There was a stairwell leading down and he took it, let himself plunge deeper into the Combine’s grip. He could see those blue eyes in the corner of his vision, the gaunt face watching in the sputtering beam of the flashlight.

His torch’s battery finally died and the halls were plunged into total darkness and Gordon kept running, feeling his way around corners with one hand pressed to the wall and squinting into the black and praying for the Vortigaunts’ god to take mercy on him, for someone to find him before the man in the suit did.

His foot caught on something and he fell, his helmet cracking hard against the concrete. He fumbled blindly in the dark, wishing desperately that he wasn’t wearing heavy gloves, that he could at least feel his way around instead of being trapped inside the HEV suit, robbed of all his senses.

The blackness was all consuming. Gordon had never been one to fear the dark, not even after days waiting for death in the shadows of Black Mesa, but there had never been anything worth fearing in it. Vortigaunts, marines and assassins could maim and kill him, but Gordon had never been scared of pain or death. 

He glanced around in the darkness, searching for a hint of luminescent blue, a flash of paper white skin.

Pain was never a worry, but loss was omnipresent.

A brilliant red light flooded his vision, and he recoiled, grasping blindly at the walls for something to arm himself with against the Combine. His hand found nothing but concrete and on reflex, Gordon made a fist and drove it into the light.

His knuckles thudded against something hard, and he felt them fall back, and he was falling with them, they had gotten a hand around the metal of the chest plate-

The flare bounced on the tile as they rolled across the floor. The Combine had their arms up over their mask, but that had never gotten between him and an objective before. He reared back, raising a heavy, metal-gloved fist, only to feel someone seize his arms.

He struggled against their grip, but they held fast as he writhed. The Combine was grabbing at their mask, yanking it off, and it was Barney, eyes wide and scared in the glow of the flare.

“It’s me.” Barney mouthed, his hands by his head, surrendering. “Please, it’s me.”

Gordon stared down at him, suddenly light headed. He remembered every Metrocop he had ever killed, the red smearing their bone-white masks. He felt nothing at the thought of them bleeding out in the streets of City 17, but something else clawed at his throat. A second later and Barney would have joined their ranks.

The hold on him—Alyx, it was Alyx, how could he have not known, they had sparred hundreds of times—loosened, and he found himself slumping forward, all his strings cut.

Barney lay stock still for a minute more, then slowly sat up and put a hand on his shoulder, tugging him in. The other slid down his side to gently probe the tear in the armor, the ripped IV and pooling blood. 

He pulled his hands away and stared at the blood on his gloves. His lips were moving again, but Gordon only caught the last bit as Alyx grabbed the flare and brought it closer. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”

He glanced up at Gordon’s face and switched to sign, his hands quick and jittery. “I needed something flashy and—and lethal looking, and they were behind you and if I didn’t do something, they’d get suspicious and then we’d all be in a cell and they’d kill Alyx and all I could think of were the IVs—" 

His hands were shaking too much for Gordon to read and he gently reached out and caught them. Gordon’s heart thudded hard against his ribs, but he pushed the guilt, the fear, somewhere deep enough that it couldn’t reach him. There was no time for it. There never would be.

Barney stilled, shoulders heaving, and wrapped his arms around him, pressing his face against the cold, dirty metal of the HEV. Gordon froze, distantly aware he was straddling him, that Alyx had knelt next to them to rub circles on his back just below the chest plate. After a long minute where Barney still hadn’t let go, Gordon awkwardly folded his arms around him, the heavy armor bumping against the thick padding of his coat.

He smelled like sweat and blood and dirt, a far cry from the cheap cologne he used to keep in his locker. Gordon couldn’t feel his warmth through the HEV or Barney’s uniform, but his shape was familiar even after twenty years of hard living. 

Barney didn’t meet his eyes when he finally pulled away. 

“Don’t worry,” Gordon said. “Just blood loss. Broke the life support. Good shot.”

Barney gave him a disbelieving look. “I shot you. Point blank.”

Gordon shrugged. His favorite hobby was getting shot at by Combine soldiers. It seemed petty to hold a grudge over just one bullet, even if it had led… that thing to him.

His chest twanged again, as if the very thought of the man had pulled at the chords. Gordon shuddered and set his jaw. He couldn’t blame Barney for not accounting for something he couldn’t remember for more than five minutes. 

He patted Barney’s shoulder and passed him his mask. “It’s okay. You did what you had to.”

Barney stared deep into the lenses. The flare’s light made the dark glass shine arterial red. He sighed and carefully extricated himself out from under him, tucking the gasmask under his arm.

Alyx nudged Gordon gently with her shoulder, and he let her help him up. She grimaced as she prodded at the hole in his side, twisting the cut tubes between her fingers. “This is… bad. There’s no computer chips there, but he hit the lines to the blood oxygenator and the intravenous medicine pump. Without that, there’s no way to administer blood 

“I’m fine,” Gordon insisted, swaying on his feet. He could feel something warm and wet slosh around his boots. “All the blood’s inside the suit. Where it belongs.”

Alyx, for once, didn’t find that funny. She glared at him. “If you get even a little light headed, tell me.”

“I will,” he promised. 

She sighed and passed Barney the flare. “I can’t let the Opener of The Way—" her hands splayed out sarcastically in the formal sign—“bleed out on my watch. White Forest would kill me. The Vortigaunts would do my eulogy. It’d be beautiful.” She shook her head and took a deep breath. “C’mon. Let’s go bash some ‘Bine.”

The complex was dark and empty, and Barney led them straight down the center of the corridor, barely pausing to check each intersection. He didn’t even bother to slide his mask back on. 

“Where are the Combine?” Gordon asked, checking behind them for pale masks in the dark or the bright blue sight of a sniper. “Did you kill them all?”

“I wish. That’d make this easier.” Alyx laughed, but after a moment, her features settled into something calmer and colder. Her fingers flicked out sharply, cool and professional. “Barney found me a little while after they caught you. He found out where the supply room and your cell was, and we rigged some hoppers and grenades on the other side of the building. They should be occupied for a while.”

Gordon nodded. “Good planning.”

Alyx didn’t smile at the praise like she usually did. She scratched at the inside of her wrist and shot a worried look at Barney’s back.

“Gordon, you’ve never had to wipe out a Combine base, have you?”

He hummed, flipping back through every mission the Resistance had sent him on since he’d landed in the future. Saving civilians, escorting supply lines, guarding convoys as they moved from one outpost to another. He had always moved in a straight line from one point to the next. No one had ever sent him in with the expectation that he clear an entire base. He suspected that nobody wanted to see what he’d do when his mission was bloodshed and the Combine weren’t just collateral.

Gordon shook his head and Alyx sighed, flexing her fingers and trying to find her words. “Do you remember how I said that the Transhuman forces need Combine tech to eat?”

He nodded.

“It’s all done through a single feeding station. Sometimes two, if it’s a really big outpost,” she explained. “If you know they won’t be able to hurt anyone nearby, and you know they won’t be able to reach another base…”

“You destroy the supply room,” Gordon finished.

“And they starve.” Alyx grimaced. “They could have all the ration bars in the world, and they’d still wither away without the right equipment. You wait two weeks and send a dozen soldiers in to disarm anything that hasn’t kicked it, then steal everything you can fit in a convoy.”

“It’s an awful way to die,” she said, not meeting his eye. “It’s slow and wasting. You’re not even really there at the end of it. People stop trying and start waiting.”

Gordon nodded, but had nothing to say, or at least nothing honest. Up until a few months ago, the longest he had gone without food were the hectic two days before his thesis presentation. Alyx had grown up in the Resistance, living in the margins and teetering over the abyss on a narrow scaffold of faulty supply lines and scavenged rations. 

“Don’t think worse of us for it,” Alyx asked. She pressed a hand to his shoulder, knuckles going white as she squeezed the metal plating. “Or at least, don’t blame Barney. It was my idea first. No matter what he says.”

Gordon couldn’t feel her palm through the armor, but he leaned in all the same, letting her chase out the last echoes of his employer’s hands in his chest. 

Barney shot a glance up and down the hall and stopped. They had reached a heavy, solid door. It looked the same as every other one in the complex, but the lock was different. Bulkier.

Barney folded up the edge of his glove and pressed it under the scanner. After a long, nerve wracking moment, the lock’s lights flashed and the door swung open.

Gordon thought the supply room would be absolutely crawling with Combine, but it was empty. It was smaller than he expected too. The ceiling was low and bowed in the middle under the weight of the massive pipes criss crossing it and a row of enormous tanks, like the ones that held heating oil in White Forest, were lined up against the far wall. Each one had a spigot at waist height. They looked like a cross between a gas station pump and surgical equipment.

There were no shields. Nothing jumped out at them. They were alone with the Combine’s lifeblood.

Alyx took a deep breath and stepped towards the tanks. Her fists were balled, but Gordon could still see her hands shake.

“Alyx, don’t worry about it. I’ll do it.” Barney held a hand out to stop her. He unhooked his baton from his belt and lined up the arc of his swing with the tubes snaking out of the tank. His knuckles were white on the grip.

“No.” Alyx set herself between the tank and Barney. She held out her hand. “Give me the baton.”

Barney tucked it protectively under his arm and stared her down, face lined and worn. “C’mon Alyx. Just let me do it.”

She set her jaw. “No.”

“Alyx, please.”

Alyx gave him a chilly look, and for the briefest moment she was the spitting image of her father in White Forest's war room, the same furrowed brow and narrow eyes. “I need to do this. It has to happen.”

“It has to happen, but you don’t have to be the one to do it,” Barney said, his hands slicing the air. “I’m not going to make you do this.”

“Quit patronizing me. I chose this. You’re not making me do anything,” Alyx snapped. “Barney, what kind of leader would I be if I left the hard parts to everyone else? If I’m making the tough calls, I’m going to get my hands dirty for them.”

Barney frowned. “Is that what you think being a leader means?”

She sighed, her shoulders slumping, and stepped out of his way. Barney shot her a wan smile, but Alyx didn’t return it. She rolled the charm on her necklace between her fingers as Barney stepped forward and raised his stun baton. His eyes were cold and distant.

It happened in a heartbeat. Alyx barreled into him, grabbing at the baton as they fell to the ground. Gordon ran forward, desperate to help but unsure how to. Barney went for a headlock but hesitated, his arms going slack, and Alyx seized the opening to kick off of him and snatch the baton. In a single, fluid motion, she spun and brought it down on the spigot of the nearest tank. 

The thin plastic broke easily under the baton’s heavy metal head and something smooth and viscous burst from the tank and oozed across the tile. Alyx smiled, a thin, shaking thing, and drove the baton into the side of another tank.

Barney was still on the ground, the Combine’s food lapping at his boots. Gordon offered him a hand and pulled him to his feet, but he never looked away from Alyx. His eyes were frantic but lost, and Gordon wished he had something, anything, to take the panic away.

He squeezed Barney’s hand and let go. The deed was as good as done. All that was left was the clear, bright line between point A and point B. There was a heavy wrench set against the wall and he grabbed it, testing the weight in his hands. He found a decent grip, pulled back, and tore it through the tubing and pipework lining the ceiling. 

He wasn’t sure how long they took, ripping the life support systems to shreds. Where he opted for a more scattershot approach, hammering open anything that looked vaguely important, Alyx was methodical. She ground her heel down on each of the delicate pumps and connectors until they fragmented into tiny slivers of resin and plastic, useless to anyone.

Barney just watched. Gordon didn’t let himself look at his expression.

Finally, Alyx seemed satisfied with their work and waded back through the spilled food to where Barney was waiting at the door. She didn’t meet his eye as she wiped the Combine feed off his baton and handed it back to him. “Thanks.”

Barney stuffed it back in its holster. If Gordon had thought his sign was eerily emotionless with the mask on, it was nothing compared to how he looked now. His mouth was pressed in a thin, hard line, but his eyes gave nothing away. Gordon wondered if he looked like that under his mask, if he took the bright eyes and smile Gordon had always liked off as easily as he pulled on the uniform.

“The Combine will catch up soon,” he signed. “There’s a hanger that should be almost empty. We can regroup there and figure something out.”

“Does it have gunships?” Alyx paced the room, head bowed. Gordon wasn’t sure if she was really that worried, or if she just didn’t want to meet Barney’s eye. “I could try reprogramming one. Better odds in the air than on foot.” 

He blinked. “You can do that?”

“We’ll find out.” She shrugged. “We don’t really have any other options.”

Barney nodded and slipped out the door. Alyx and Gordon fell into a run behind him.

Gordon stared at their backs as if Barney’s CP uniform and Alyx’s threadbare jacket held all the secrets in the world. He wished he had had a grenade. That would have made things quicker. Maybe if it had been as simple as pulling a pin, Barney wouldn’t have gotten so caught up on the details. Maybe Alyx would look them in the eye.

Barney was leading them back up through the complex, taking the stairs two at a time and holding the flare out in front of him like a sword. Gordon held his breath as they passed by each doorframe. With the captioning broken, he’d have no way of noticing Combine before he saw them or they shot him.

They veered left, down an oversized hallway with a high, arched ceiling. Now more than ever, the base reminded Gordon of Black Mesa, how human life had seemed like an architectural afterthought. Barney stopped at the end of the hall in front of a tall set of double doors. He carefully checked the chamber of his pulse rifle, counting his shots, and took a deep breath. He kicked the door open hard enough to make the frame rattle and fired three quick shots into the room.

Alyx winced and cast a glance down the hallway. Gordon didn’t need to hear to know that their radios had gone off. Their chances at stealth were over. 

Barney signed an all-clear for Gordon and Alyx and led them inside. The ceiling of the hanger was high enough that the flare's light couldn’t reach it, and the air smelled cold and metallic. The room was ringed with computer consoles and racks of maintenance equipment that looked halfway between a mechanic’s toolbox and a surgeon’s tools. Above them, enormous pods hung from the walls, and under their thick glass Gordon could see warped shadows of Combine synths shifting inside. Striders and gunships writhed in their stasis tubes, cut off from life support just like the Elites. 

In the corner, three Metrocop bodies bled out on the cold concrete. Their masks were off, showing three unaltered human faces, each sporting a bullet hole. A faded deck of cards was scattered around them.

Barney didn’t look at them as he jogged to the closest gunship pod. The synth was thrashing in its tube, its flippers striking futilely at the glass. Alyx jammed her EMP tool into the wall module and the screen lit up, sparking and flashing glitched code. 

The front of the pod swung open and a wave of greenish muck flooded out onto the concrete floor. The synth jerked forward and its enormous body fell to the ground, splashing life support fluid everywhere. Its bioluminescent underside flashed and spasmed as it rolled across the floor, vestigial legs skittering for purchase. Its chiton heaved and pulsed in the open air as it struggled to make sense of freedom without instruction.

Alyx approached it carefully as its thick, flat flippers pawed at the ground. She set her jaw and leapt onto it, locking her knees behind what Gordon could only assume were two huge compound eyes. Its rotor spun as it tried to knock her off, but she quickly drove her EMP tool into the Combine control box embedded in its backplate. Gordon grabbed the synth by its abdomen and held it down before it could go into another death roll. Alyx shot him an unsteady smile and began typing something into the keypad of the EMP tool. 

The rotor of the gunship began to spin and the synth rose from the floor, Alyx clinging to its back like a flea on a dog. She waved for Barney to hop on. He grimaced and hauled himself onto its back, using the thing’s flippers and handholds.

The gunship bucked under Gordon’s grip, its rotor lashing back and forth as it spun, and he could see flashlights in the hall. He straddled the gunship and wrapped his arms tight around Barney’s waist as it rose into the air. It was time to go.

Behind him, Alyx twisted something in the access panel and the gunship was off like a shot. Gordon’s head snapped back with the sudden speed as the synth tore through the Combine soldiers lurking just outside in a flurry of body armor and poorly aimed grenades. The guards went flying, arms and legs pinwheeling through the air. The synth was around the corner before he could watch them land, following the huge access hall up and up through the base.

Someone was chasing them, blue laser sights glittering on the dark walls, but the gunship was too fast. Even in pitch black, it veered around the base’s labyrinthine turns with ease, its enormous rotor smashing into Elites as they struggled to land a hit. They could try—Gordon knew from experience that pulse rifle fire was nothing to an incensed gunship.

They tore through another intersection, and he could finally see light ahead, taste the cold wind blowing in from outside. The gunship surged ahead. Gordon could feel its vascular system thump frantically underneath him. He had never thought of the Combine’s synthetic forces as truly alive, but Gordon knew that all encompassing drive to complete a task, to do what you had always been meant for. It wasn’t happiness, but it could be if you were desperate enough.

He clung to Barney’s uniform as they rocketed out of the base, wincing as a bullet clipped his armor. He spared a glimpse back at the throng of Combine spilling out of the complex, their armored plating glinting under the glow of their emergency flares and pulse rifles. From this high up, they looked more like ants spilling out of a disrupted nest than an elite army.

They rose higher and higher. The gunship had tilted back at almost a ninety degree angle, racing upwards like it was trying to reach whatever far off planet it had been plucked from. The Earth fell away until the Combine base wasn’t even a pinprick, until the mountaintops were level with them and clouds drifted close enough to touch, until it was only the three of them, far from fascist overlords and capitalist gods and dead men walking.

Behind him, Alyx punched the wind. Gordon couldn’t keep a smile off his face. Above the clouds, the sky was a clear, flat black, dotted with a million distant points of light. The moon hung low over the pale blue line of the horizon, glowing like an enormous searchlight.

Gordon winced as his ears popped. The adrenaline was fading, and he finally started to notice the chill creeping in through the suit’s insulation. The air was thin and bitingly cold, but for once it didn’t carry the taste of smoke and dust. Without the HEV suit reoxygenating his blood. It was all he could do to clutch Barney’s back and keep steady.

At least Alyx seemed to have noticed, and Gordon watched the white mountains rise up around them as she gentled the synth back below the clouds. 

He didn’t let go of Barney. Even through the heavy CP uniform, Gordon could feel his heartbeat, warm and steady. He hadn’t realized how much he had needed that until it had been hidden behind a gasmask.

Gordon sighed and let his head rest between his shoulder blades, their armor the only thing between them.

The highway slid into view as Alyx steered them around another towering peak, its cracked asphalt glittering under the stars. Thick forest flicked by underneath them, the carpet of old growth trees occasionally giving way to clearings and craters in the Earth where bombs had once fallen. Narrow rivers cut through the woods, looping around overgrown headcrab shells and rusted out ATVs. Ahead of them, past the craggy mountains and foothills, an enormous marsh spread out across the landscape, and past that, an endless expanse of water. 

Gordon gasped in spite of himself. It was the first time he had seen open water since the lonely drive up City 17’s coast. The Black Sea was only a thin pane of water on the horizon, but it was beautiful. Dark waves swelled under the moon and crashed against distant piers. Empty beach houses dotted the shore, casting long shadows across the sand. There were no shipwrecks marooned on the shore by a receding ocean or deadly Xenian algal blooms painting the water a bioluminescent yellow.

Alyx must have seen it too. The gunship thrummed happily as she led it into a giddy barrel roll. Barney tensed as they flipped over, but Gordon could only laugh breathlessly and squeeze his chest.

There was still a piece of the old world left, something salvageable on this dead planet. They were going to live.

The gunship found the Convoy first. Gordon felt it buzz excitedly as it fell into a shallow dive, picking up speed as it swooped towards the road. He scanned the woods below and finally spotted the flickering orange light of a campfire through the canopy.

Gordon didn’t see the rocket propelled grenade until the gunship shot it down. He squinted through the flare of the explosion, eyes watering. Below, someone in the camp loaded another grenade into the launcher’s barrel. He could feel that Barney was shouting something, his chest vibrating as he bellowed at the gunman.

The Resistance member—Noriko, she had stepped closer to the fire—lowered the gun and stood back as Alyx landed the gunship in the middle of the camp. Vortigaunts and humans alike gawked at the synth hovering in the middle of the clearing as Gordon let go of Barney and slid off its back. Barney stumbled after him onto terra firma, looking distinctly green. 

Alyx stayed aboard, petting the gunship’s carapace. She was beaming.

“You caught one?” Griggs signed, mouth slack. “How?”

Alyx’s hands flew wide and eager. “The Combine has access to their nervous systems through an implant. If you can keep up the commands, you can steer them pretty well,” she shot a fond look at the gunship. “Honestly though, this one seemed pretty happy just to get out of there.”

“And the base?” Noriko asked, the rocket launcher still leaning against her thigh. “Combine, exterminated?”

Alyx nodded. “They will be. I smashed the tanks myself.”

A murmur went through the crowd. Even the Vortigaunts seemed impressed.

“Wrecked a base and stole their cavalry! White Forest’s gonna shit a brick!” Sheckley’s grin went from ear to ear as he clapped his hands. Griggs, never one to be left out, joined in, and soon the whole convoy were stomping their feet and signing in rapid fire pidgin. Gordon caught only a few words: Alyx. Legend. Hero. Leader.

Mary paused her whooping and hollering long enough to shoot him and Barney a sheepish smile. “Sorry. Don’t want to sell you short. I’m sure you both took your pound of flesh.”

Barney shrugged, his mouth pressed in a thin line. “Don’t worry. This one was all Alyx.”

The cheering and declarations that Alyx Vance’s conquering of the Carpathian Combine would be told for years finally started to die down. It helped that nobody seemed to want to get too close to the gunship, even with Alyx on its back. She was signing breathlessly to the rebels, promising a play by play around the campfire as soon as they’d cleaned up.

She gave the gunship one last affectionate scratch between its plating before she pulled her multitool from its back and got off. It stared at her, flippers tapping uselessly against the wet earth, and for a moment Gordon worried that something more than Combine programming drove the synths to hunt and kill.

Alyx smiled sadly at it and flicked a hand up towards the heavens. Somehow, it understood. Gordon watched the gunship fly slowly off into the night, swooping and rolling in the moonlight. Like the Elites, it would starve without the Combine to feed it, but it would die free. That was more than Gordon could claim.

He stumbled and felt his knees go out from under him. Barney wrapped an arm around his waist and shouted something to Alyx. Gordon watched fresh blood splatter the dirt in a thin red trail as they led him away from the fire.

Getting out of the suit was a blur. Blood loss and high altitude air left him dazed and listless as Barney and Alyx pulled it apart. They were talking, waving their hands and moving their mouths indistinctly. Barney frowned as he unzipped the padding to hold the wires and tubes steady for Alyx. Alyx’s hands were grimy, the nails dyed rust red with dried blood. Her jaw was clenched, and Gordon could see the tendons of her hands jump with tension as she fiddled with the catheters. 

Then it was off. His own chest, pale and sickly in the firelight, his own bruised elbows, still bleeding as Barney applied a styptic pen and Alyx ran a wet washcloth down his side. She waved a handful of clean clothes in his face, and he raised his arms and let her dress him.

They helped him stumble over to a truck and sit against one of its enormous tires. Barney shoved his canteen into his hands and stared at Gordon until he was sure he had drunk all of it. It was hard to keep the bitter water down with a pounding headache and an empty stomach, but Barney’s stern look said he didn’t have a choice.

He groaned and slumped back against the tire, wiping his mouth and scanning the campfire for dinner. He always forgot how hungry he was when he was in the HEV suit. Kleiner would probably blame some unholy side effect of mixing adrenaline and painkillers.

“Food?” he signed.

Barney nodded and disappeared behind the truck. Gordon wasn’t sure how long he was gone, only that Alyx sat with him while he waited, anxiously rolling her necklace between fingers and signing something about blood thinners and a clot breaking. 

When Barney came back, he had a small box under his arm. He flopped down next to them and laid the contents out: more bottles of treated rainwater and five crumpled ration bars. Barney set two on Gordon’s knee, two in front of Alyx, and unwrapped the final one for himself. 

“Barney, where’s the rest of your ration?” Alyx signed slowly. “I thought dinner was two to a person?”

Barney swallowed a hunk of his bar and took a swig of water. “Foraging was shit today. No one could find anything that wasn’t a poison headcrab. The Vorts said we need to make the non perishables last.”

“It’s going to be a rough winter, huh.” Alyx grimaced, running a hand through her knotted hair. “Last one was bad enough without the rest of City 17 to feed.”

Gordon frowned and tapped a fist over his stomach, the pidgin for famine. Somehow it was easier to ask in the Resistance’s sign. ASL hadn’t been made for war.

The two of them shared a long, pained look. Gordon abruptly felt like a kid again, asking his parents if they were going to have to move now that Dad had lost his job.

“We’ll see,” Alyx said, unnervingly resigned. “Depends on how bad the portal storms are in the city, depends on if Mossman gets that garden going. We can’t do anything about it now.” She sighed and tossed one of her bars to Barney. “You take it. You’re bigger than me.”

He caught it easily and threw it back to her. “And you’re still growing. It’s yours.”

“I’m 24, Barney. I’m not a kid.” She scowled and chucked it back at him. “Quit patronizing me.”

“When I was 24, I was way less picky about a free meal,” Barney said, rolling his eyes. “It’s called looking out for you.”

Alyx’s mouth twisted, and Gordon could feel the tension that had been brewing between them snap. “Were you looking out for me when you gunned down your own unit?”

Barney froze mid-throw, the ration falling limply out of his hand.

Something like guilt flitted across Alyx’s face, but she set her jaw and stared him down. “Were you?”

Gordon, who was rapidly getting dizzy from watching them play dystopian hot potato, threw up his hands. “Just take my ration! I’ll be fine!”

Alyx and Barney shot twin glares at him and pinched their fingers together in a resounding no. He winced and slumped back against the truck tire, anxiously fiddling with the cap of Barney’s canteen. Neither of them pulled their punches—not during spars, and not to each other.

“They were just some Combine,” Barney signed stiffly. “I shot plenty of them during the Uprising. So did you. It’s not a big deal.”

“I’ve known you my whole life. Don’t lie to me.” Alyx’s hands sliced through the air, cold and clear. “You knew them. You worked with them. You were playing cards with them.”

Barney looked away, a frown tugging at his lips. His sign was crisp and clear, but Gordon could see his hands shake. “I have always, always been loyal to the Resistance.”

“I never said you weren’t,” Alyx signed. “But you didn’t have to be the one to kill them. There were only three of them. I could have done it. Hell, Gordon could have.”

Barney grit his teeth. “Half of Gordon got splattered around that base.”

“It’s Gordon. He’d figure it out.” She shook her head. “It doesn’t matter. You didn’t have to do it. Not when you knew it would hurt you.”

“Alyx, do we have to do this tonight?” Barney’s eyes were tired. “It doesn’t matter.”

“Then when will we? You always do this!” She threw her hands in the air. “You act like none of this affects you, that you don’t care, then you feel guilty or useless or something and throw yourself into doing terrible shit because you think that’ll fix things!”

She ran a hand down her face and took a long, wavering breath. “How am I supposed to trust you in the field if I can’t even trust you’ll take care of yourself.”

“Trust you?” Barney signed incredulously. “You tackled me! You tricked me over what—a couple of dead Transhumans? The Resistance’s respect? You already have that.”

“You know I’m not a glory hound.” Alyx twisted her hands sharply. “Don’t pretend I am.”

Barney sighed, rubbing his temples. The Metrocop mask had left purple marks around the edge of his face and along the bridge of his nose. “Fine. Then what is it?”

Alyx said nothing for a long minute, her fingers twitching in the air. Barney waited, watching her with a haggard look on his face.

“Breen spent the last twenty years spouting orders from an ivory tower. I have to take responsibility for my choices,” she finally said. “If I’m going to take over from Dad, I need to be better. I need to be used to it.”

“You want to be used to personally starving hundreds of people?” Barney asked. She flinched. “Does Eli want that? Did he tell you to go cause an artificial famine to toughen you up? Because if he did—"

“Shut up about my Dad!” Alyx tore a hand through her messy hair, breathing hard. “Gordon wakes up every morning to go beat people to death with a crowbar. You’ve been shoving boots down your throat and disappearing on me for the last decade. The whole world’s screwed up. The least we can do is own it.”

“I don’t care how fucked Earth is! You’re a leader. You’re my—" He swallowed hard, hands stuttering. “You’re the last person I want thinking this is normal, that people are supposed to starve each other out in the middle of fuckoff nowhere!” Barney caught his breath, panting. His shoulders shook, and Gordon could see the mask he’d put on in the base fall to pieces. “I’m already Combine, Alyx. I sniped their dissidents. I starved and beat their civilians. Hell, I even took potshots at the One Free Man. I’m  _ actually  _ used to this. I can’t care anymore. The least you can do is use that for something good.”

Alyx stared at him, her fists clenching and unclenching. When she spoke, her sign was small and sharp. “You think I want that. You really think I want that.”

Barney didn’t meet her eyes. “I think we need it.”

“The Resistance doesn’t need a Combine on a leash! I don’t need a Combine on a leash!” Alyx’s hands sliced through the air like knives as she shouted. Her face was red. Tears rolled down her cheeks. “I need my uncle!”

She sat there, panting hard and wiping her eyes. A green set of talons rested on her shoulder, and Gordon realized that one of the Vortigaunts, the one in the three armed sweater, had come over. They were saying something, sharp teeth flashing in the light of the bonfire, but Alyx and Barney didn’t translate.

The Vortigaunt offered him a hand and he took it, shooting a confused look at Alyx and Barney.

Alyx wiped her face on her sleeve and signed, her gestures small and careful. “They said they think the fire and some weird medicine might make you feel better.”

Gordon glanced between her and Barney, who was still as white as a sheet, and raised his eyebrows.

“Don’t worry about it. I’ve got to fix the HEV suit. See if I can salvage any of the tubing.” She grabbed the chest piece and balanced it in her lap, carefully avoiding Barney’s gaze. “See?”

“Yeah,” Barney agreed, standing and dusting off his CP uniform. “I should—I should go. Arlene and Mary probably want me to help with… something.”

The Vortigaunt squeezed his shoulder, and Gordon held up a finger. He snatched the ration bar from the dirt where it had been forgotten in the argument, and broke it and his second bar into thirds. He shoved two pieces each into Barney and Alyx’s hand and turned away before they could object. 

The Vortigaunt hurried behind him as he stumbled towards the fire, tripping over supply crates and bedrolls. He only slowed when his head started to spin and he was sure they weren’t going to chase him down and cram their rations down his throat.

He sighed and crammed his pieces into his mouth. Water flavored, again. Scientific American and political adverts had promised him a future without hunger, without famine. Gordon had seen too many friends scrape by on SSI to ever really believe it, but chewing on reduced rations in 2020 made reality taste all the more bitter. 

The humans had already left camp, probably trying to work in another hunt before the convoy had to leave, but the Vortigaunts kept their usual post by the fire. It had burned down to charcoal and embers, and one of them threw another bundle of salvaged wood onto it when they saw Gordon and their kin approaching. 

He all but collapsed on their blanket. Rocks dug into his back as he stared at the sparks flitting towards the moon above. The clouds were low and heavy with soot. The sky had seemed so much clearer on the gunship’s back.

One of the Vorts nudged his cheek and another was poked curiously at his pale, skinny arms. He grimaced and sat up, wincing at the dull shock of pain through his temples. They pressed a slate into his hands, and he grabbed the attached chalk. The Vortigaunts had never quite picked up the pidgin or ASL aside from a few key phrases. Gordon figured that if he had nine fingers spread out over three arms, keeping track of ten on two would be pretty difficult. At least when they were all writing, everyone was equally awkward. It was better than being the one person struggling with the HEV suit’s AAC software.

Gordon held up the board so the Vortigaunts could read it. “You said you had a cure?”

The one with a cheap, dollar-tree Santa hat pulled over their ears took it, and the rest of the congregation immediately began vibrating and waving their talons at them. They gnashed their teeth and began to write. “This is no tearing of flesh. There is no cure, save for rest and comfort.”

He sighed and glanced back at the truck. Alyx was hauling pieces of the HEV suit, her face hidden by her hair. Barney was long gone.

He frowned at the memory of him snapping his arms into the lambda, the One Free Man. It felt wrong. Physics with two G’s was his name, at least when Barney was signing it.

The Vortigaunt tilted their head and scrawled another few lines. “We are pleased for the Freeman’s safe return and good health, regardless of your Vortal fluids.”

He held out his hands for the slate. “Thanks. Not sure about the health, though.”

One of the Vortigaunts patted his arm, inspecting the gauze, and another stole back the slate. Immediately, the rest of the Vorts circled them to give their input, tapping and gesturing, until finally they turned it back to Gordon. One of them had added a tiny, four eyed Vortigaunt face. Its mouth was pulled in what Gordon could only assume was their somewhat distressing impression of a human smile. “All wounds are merely oscillations. The Combine’s lair clouded our sight. We feared you had been cleaved from the Vortessence entirely.”

Gordon nodded. He wondered what Alyx and Barney would have done if the man had taken him again. Would they have moved on, or would they be still in the base, desperately searching for someone long gone? Would Barney have clung to his crowbar another twenty years, hoping?

The Vortigaunt with the chalk vibrated, low and thrumming, and wiped the slate clean. “What visions disturb the Freeman? The body may be whole, your line to life unsevered, yet we still see your chords fray. Your victory has been tumultuous.”

Gordon didn’t know how to put words to something he barely understood himself. He tore the foil wrapper off of his ration, wincing as he swallowed too fast and nearly choked. His face burned as he snatched his canteen and gulped down the acrid tasting water. He had only spent months living in the future, but he already ate like everyone else. 

The Vortigaunt with the chalk paused, eyeing him over, and gently set the slate in his lap. They dug through a duffel bag held together with more duct tape than thread and pulled a plastic bag of Bullsquid jerky from it.

Gordon’s mouth watered, but he shook his head. He grabbed the chalk. “I already had my rations. Don’t waste yours.”

The Vortigaunt dropped the bag in his lap and took the board back. “The Freeman has helped sever the chords of many foes. There is no shame in giving aid.”

Gordon pushed the bag away. He wondered if people would ever stop burning themselves up to keep him warm.

The Vortigaunts gnashed their teeth and vibrated furiously. One plucked the slate from his hands, and Gordon watched the chalk pass from claw to claw as each Vort made their additions. He flinched as they shoved the board inches from his face, tapping at the words with one long, narrow claw. “Not all who sacrifice are shackled by guilt and grief. You are sib. To deprive you of sustenance is to starve ourselves.”

Gordon’s morals had never been particularly stalwart, not in the face of his own survival. He pulled out a strip of over-seasoned meat and bit into it.

The Vortigaunts settled around him on the blankets and vibrated, pleased.

Gordon sighed and leaned against the one behind him, who had begun chewing on his hair. Their smooth, scaleless skin was feverish against his own, but he didn’t mind the extra warmth. Winter would reach White Forest soon, and Barney, Alyx and him would be stuck sleeping under scavenged blankets in the heated common areas while their dorm froze over.

He rubbed his brow. Alyx and Barney rarely fought, but when they did, it was never in half measures. On the other side of camp, Alyx had spread out a tarp and was attacking the pieces of the HEV suit with her multitool, carving out hunks of melted plastic with alarming gusto. It was best to give her space when she was fighting with someone, even if she would never admit it.

He cast around for Barney, who usually took well to a gruff, masculine hug and someone to bitch to, but couldn’t find him. Gordon frowned, worried, but if the Resistance’s favorite mole didn’t want to be found, he wouldn’t be.

Another Vortigaunt nudged his shoulder and held up the slate. “Something pulls you. Your kinships are fraught.”

“Barney and Alyx are fighting.” Gordon paused, tapping the chalk against the slate. “This one was bad. I don’t know when they’ll make up.”

The Vort tilted their head consideringly. “We fastened the Vortal Chords between you and the Alyx Vance. What ties bind the Calhoun to you?”

He fumbled with the chalk for a moment, and set it aside. It seemed wrong to put it down in writing, to try to cram what was either years or decades of friendship onto a tiny slate. He didn’t have a word for it in English or ASL. 

The Vortigaunt’s stare was becoming more intense. Gordon grimaced and settled on the strange signs of pidgin, hoping they would understand. He slapped his hands together in a handshake and flexed. “Mutual Established Camaraderie.” 

The Vortigaunts around him buzzed and nodded vigorously as one took the slate back. “Black Mesa cut many ties. It is fortunate that you and the Calhoun have persisted through such adversity.” One of them grabbed the slate and squeezed more text in underneath. “Our chords bind us. Yours are not so weak as to break from mere arguments.”

They hummed as one of them wiped the slate clean, their eyes growing softer. “Fear not, Freeman. No matter our fates, we will sing of this struggle for generations. Our far flung kin, spread across space and time, will speak our names and honor our fight. We shall not be lost to the dark.”

A Vortigaunt patted his shoulder and Gordon nodded, trying his best to look affected. Legends and myths had never saved him from the shrapnel of a grenade or the burn of a sniper’s shot. He didn’t want to be just a memory of clanging steel and gunfire. He didn’t know how to live for that promise.


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Alyx plays with explosives. Barney enforces gun safety. Gordon plays dress up.

Gordon woke to dew on his glasses and face full of green, wrinkled skin. He groaned and sat up, wiping the lenses off on his shirt. The Vortigaunts he had fallen asleep on thrummed but kept snoring, twitching their long talons and gnashing their teeth. One opened a single bleary eye and stole his blanket. 

He stood and stretched, breathing in the cold, damp morning air. The sun was just climbing over the forest, painting the branches of the dead trees a brilliant pink. The firepit smouldered, a thin line of steam rising into the air. Already, Resistance members were starting to pack up camp, hauling crates of scrabbling houndeyes and rabbits to the trucks. He’d have to suit up fast if he wanted to get to his post before they got on the road. Barney started crowing about Black Mesa every time he was late, and Alyx would repeat anything he said if it annoyed Gordon enough.

He grimaced and broke into a jog, checking behind trucks and peeking into the trailers. The Vortigaunts had spent the entire evening trying to teach him to flux shift and diligently writing down how to correctly care for an antlion nest. If they’d wanted to keep him distracted and off his feet, they’d been successful. He hadn’t seen Barney or Alyx since the fight.

He hoped they’d made up. Look-out was going to be hell if they hadn’t. 

Someone grabbed him by the scruff of his sweatshirt and Gordon stumbled mid-stride, automatically going for the HEV’s holster. Griggs grinned and let go of his shirt, putting up his hands in mock surrender. He had a thick knit cap pulled down over his ears and had already pulled his body armor on, his medic’s armband pinned crookedly to the sleeve. His boots were untied. “‘Sup, Doc!”

Gordon waved. “Have you seen Alyx and Barney? I need to get the HEV on.”

“Well, about that,” Griggs said, hands flicking out in rapidfire pidgin. “I don’t know about Barney, but I just saw Alyx. She said the HEV’s still busted. You’re riding with me and Sheck instead.”

No good excuse to keep searching the camp. Gordon’s shoulders slumped. “Ah, alright.”

“You really like sitting on top of a truck that much? At least the cab’s heated.” Griggs shot Gordon a knowing look as he started towards the convoy and smiled. “Well, I guess it’s more about who you’re with than what you’re doing, huh?”

Gordon nodded and followed, the dew soaking through the fabric of his sneakers. Griggs led him around the fire and between the eighteen-wheelers until they reached a truck in the back. It might have been orange once, but time had scraped away most of the paint and heavy metal plating had been haphazardly bolted on to cover the rest. None of the smokestacks matched, and someone had welded half of a medicine cabinet on to replace a missing side view mirror. Griggs clambered up the steps, waving his arms and shouting something.

Sheckley threw open the door and barked something at Griggs, who just laughed. He was halfway through what Gordon could only assume was a lecture when he finally looked past Griggs and noticed Gordon. He pinched the bridge of his nose, muttering something, and beckoned the two of them into the cab.

Griggs immediately flopped into the shotgun seat, kicking his feet up on the dashboard on top of dozens of old bootprints. Gordon sucked in his gut and squeezed into the back of the cab to perch on the edge of the cot. Piles of clothing and turret parts cluttered the floor, along with several stacks of heavy medical texts and a stained duffel bag spray painted with a red cross.

“Morning, Freeman,” Sheckley said, snapping his arms respectfully into the lambda. “Hope Griggs didn’t give you too much trouble.”

“You think everything’s too much trouble.” Griggs rolled his eyes, but he was smiling.

“It always is,” Sheckley huffed. “Did you remember to grab Freeman’s ration?”

“As a matter of fact, I did.” Griggs pulled a foil package from his pocket and tossed it back to Gordon. “Did you remember to top up the rig’s oil?”

Sheckley slammed his hands against the dashboard and scrambled out of the cab. 

Griggs laughed. “Don’t mind him. He’s just pissed he got Combine kibble for breakfast.” 

Gordon nodded and peeled open his ration. The labeling said it was apple flavored, but it mostly just tasted like any other Combine ration, aside from some extra wood pulp, and was about as filling. He wondered if it was normal that he was getting used to always being hungry.

He shot another anxious glance out the window. The Vorts were waking up, untangling from their pile and stretching in perfect unison. One waved to him as they gathered up their blankets and mounted the antlions.

No Alyx, no Barney. 

Sheckley came back a few minutes later, grumbling and wiping his vest off with a stained rag. He slid into the driver’s seat and jammed the key in.

Gordon winced as the engine bucked beneath them, thrumming unevenly. Sheckley drummed his fingers on the wheel as the Vorts signalled the trucks ahead of them to pull out. Finally, he got the go-ahead and started up the path of tamped down dirt and crushed grass to the road. 

Griggs and Sheckley high-fived as wheels hit asphalt and the convoy started down the highway. Gordon held tight to the back of Griggs’ seat, watching the speedometer climb until Sheckley put the truck into cruise control at a solid thirty-five. Every so often, the truck would hit a pothole or run over a fallen branch and the entire cab would bounce, sending Griggs’ textbooks and Sheckley’s turret parts flying.

Gordon only let go when he was sure the road ahead was mostly clear and Sheckley wasn’t going to catapult him into the dashboard. “What do we do now?” 

“Well, Sheckley’s gonna keep us from falling off a cliff, and the two of us are going to sit pretty and not do much of anything,” Griggs said and unlatched the glove box. He rifled through the mess of papers and ammunition and pulled out a well worn sudoku book. “Get cozy, it’s gonna be a long haul.”

Gordon frowned. “You don’t want me to shoot something?”

Griggs stared at him. “Geez Doc, the Combine weren’t enough? You could give Cubbage a lesson on bloodlust.”

Sheckley shot him a look in the rear view mirror and tilted his fist in agreement.

Gordon slumped back onto the cot, fingers twitching. Something heavy pressed down on his chest, but for once it wasn’t the HEV’s armored plating.

“C’mon Doc. Just kick back, relax, enjoy the soothing beauty of nature.” Griggs waved his hands expansively at the dead trees and lifeless grass flicking by them. Gordon couldn’t tell if he was being sarcastic. He’d gotten used to the bounce and flow of Alyx’s sign, but the finer points of pidgin were still lost to him. “Music too. We got a stereo out of one of the cars at that mall, but I’m guessing that’s not really your speed.”

“Music’s good. I like the bass,” Gordon said. “What do you have?”

Sheckley grabbed two CDs from the dashboard and brandished them at him. Their titles were in faded Cyrillic. He grinned as he slid one into the player and the cab buzzed along to the thud and thrum of the speakers.

Gordon leaned his head against the window and did his best to settle in for a long ride. The forest flicked by in a blur of green and brown, and he occasionally caught a glimpse of a wide river looping through it. With each mile, the water rose and rose until it had burst its banks, flooding the forest floor entirely. The trees grew sparser as the highway continued into full-on marshland. Their leaves gradually went from a dark green to a bright rust red, the reflections wavering on the water like pooled blood. 

Gordon sighed and fidgeted with a loose thread on his shirt. He wished he had thought to grab his bag. Kleiner and Eli had roped Magnusson and Mossman into compiling their research into a fat stack of paper for him to look over. Admittedly, most of it didn’t make sense to him—the arrival of the Combine had thrown nearly every theory of conventional physics out the window—but at least he’d be doing something useful instead of taking up space in Griggs and Sheckley’s cab.

He huffed and leaned against the padded wall. It was just as well. Kleiner kept insisting he’d be back in the lab soon, but Gordon knew his place was behind the barrel of a gun.

“So...” Sheckley signed, one hand on the wheel. Gordon had to admit, pidgin was a lot easier to use one handed than ASL. “You and Calhoun, huh. How’d that happen?”

Gordon blinked, thrown. Barney always liked telling a good story, and that was one of the few from Black Mesa that didn’t end in an abomination against God and/or mountains of paperwork.

“He was the only guy in our wing that spoke ASL other than me, so Magnusson started press-ganging him into translating his screaming. Barney felt so bad about it, he took me out for drinks,” Gordon signed, unable to keep the corners of his mouth from turning up. “I ended up buying anyway. He’s owed me a beer ever since.”

“Magnusson hasn’t changed a lick, huh.” Sheckley leaned back in his seat and whistled. “20 years. Long ass time to be together.”

“Didn’t know you had it in you,” Griggs agreed. “I kinda figured you were kinda married to the job.” He mimed a chainsaw, slicing it through imaginary zombies.

“Y’know, if you wanted to tie the knot, the Vorts have been officiating ceremonies for a while,” Sheckley said. “Folks love a wedding, no matter who’s having it. Gives them something to look forward to—"

Gordon’s brain finally caught up to his eyes. He waved his hands frantically. “You think me and Barney are —" he grimaced and shot a reflexive look over his shoulder—“G-A-Y?”

“You’re not?”

“No!”

“Easy, Freeman,” Sheckley said and steered around a gaping pothole. “The hell were you telling the Vorts then? They were getting ready to start writing vows.”

Gordon slapped his hands together and flexed pathetically. “Mutual Established Camaraderie!”

Griggs squinted. “So you are gay?”

“M-U-T-U-A-L E-S-T-A-B-L-I-S-H-E-D C-A-M-A-R-A-D-E-R-I-E,” Gordon fingerspelled. “As in mutual, established, camaraderie.”

Griggs and Sheckley stared at each other. Griggs said something, eyebrows shooting towards his hairline, and Sheckley shook his head, mouthing something else.

Gordon drummed his fingers on his knee. “Are you done yet?”

“Doc, that means gay,” Griggs slowly signed. Sheckley said something and he rolled his eyes. “Well, technically it does mean ‘life-long brothers fighting valiantly under the banner of the glorious liberation’ too, but mostly it means you’re valiantly sharing a bunk under the banner of the glorious liberation.” 

Gordon felt a headache coming on. He rubbed hard at the bridge of his nose. “Why are those synonyms.”

“Do I look like a fucking linguist?”

Gordon groaned and put his head in his hands. The Vortigaunts were notorious gossips once something caught their many, many eyes. By the time they set up camp, the entire convoy and most of White Forest would probably have been regaled with the Freeman and the Calhoun’s epic romance. Christ. How was he going to explain this Kleiner and Eli and Alyx? To Barney?

Wait. Barney.

The conversation from the night before flashed behind Gordon’s eyes like a waking nightmare. “You’re gay?!”

Sheckley and Griggs stared at him, flabbergasted. “What the hell did you think we were?”

“Brothers!”

“Wow,” Griggs said, looking vaguely disgusted. “Thanks for letting me know they had brain flukes in 2000.”

The cab lapsed into silence again. Griggs scratched idly at his sudoku. Gordon picked at the loose threads of his shirt and tried not to make eye contact. Sheckley veered the truck around the matted and bony remains of something that had died in the road.

Griggs finally huffed and set down his pencil. “Look. Freeman, I know it’s probably hard to believe, but things actually have gotten better. Nobody at White Forest would bat an eye.”

Sheckley cracked a bitter grin. “It’s easy to have marriage equality when nobody can get legally married. And there’s no more children to save…”

“And a lot of the religious types have been quiet since the ‘Bine zombified the Pope—"

Sheckley laughed. “God, you should have seen everyone’s faces when the hat fell off.” He mimed a headcrab flying through the air, twitching his fingers. “Jumped right at the nearest Cardinal.”

“And nobody wants to start shit when there’s 4 antipopes. The Vort one I kinda saw coming, but the antlion? Real curveball.”

Gordon’s headache was getting worse. “Wait, what—"

The truck ahead of them stopped short, brake lights flaring. Sheckley slammed his foot down on the brakes and Gordon ducked as all of the luggage toppled forward, narrowly missing his head as they skidded to a halt. Sheckley smacked his hand on the wheel and glared at the blinking red tail lights ahead of them.

Griggs shot an anxious look at the stalled convoy before he raised his hands again. “We’re not blind, doc. Every second you don’t spend killing or hanging out with Vance, you’re following Calhoun around like a giant, murderous puppy. And if you’re just friends, that’s fine.” He paused and took a deep breath. “But I think you’d regret it if you didn’t take a minute to think it over.”

“But—"

“Look, I’m 39.” Sheckley wasn’t looking at him. “I wasn’t that old when the Combine set up shop, but I was old enough to know what things were like for folks like us. I know it can’t be easy, carrying that baggage around. It took me long enough to deal with it.”

Gordon’s fingers twitched, ready to deny it on reflex, but he held it back.

“C’mon,” Sheckley said, grabbing a shotgun from under his seat. “Let’s go see what stupid bullshit we’ve hit now. And for God’s sake, Griggs, tie your shoelaces.”

Gordon followed them out of the cab and up the convoy. The Vortigaunts stood guard on their mounts, reigns in one hand, electricity humming around the other. The drivers peered out of their windows, squinting towards the front of the caravan and shooting Gordon anxious looks as he passed. Their fingers moved in quick, indecipherable pidgin. 

Gordon nodded and hoped it looked like he knew what he was doing. He felt very underdressed in his jeans and hoodie, especially next to Griggs and Sheckley in full armor. 

Alyx and Barney were already at the head of the convoy, standing next to a Vort on antlion-back and trading a pair of binoculars back and forth. Gordon ran to them, but stopped short when he saw the road ahead.

The waters of the marsh had finally risen above the edges of the highway and spilled across it. The pavement cracked and bowed under the force of the water as it swirled in eddies over the road. Half a football field away, the highway rose and continued on, looping through dead pine trees and muddy water. 

“It’s about five feet at the deepest,” Alyx signed while Barney squinted through the binoculars. Her hair stuck out of her ponytail at odd angles and there were dark bags under her eyes. She had definitely slept in her clothes from the night before, her flannel smeared with mechanic’s grease and the bright blue fluid of the HEV’s force-reactive plating. “The Vorts waded an antlion out there to check. We’re definitely not going to be able to just drive through.”

Gordon frowned and shielded his eyes from the hazy sun as he searched for land, some kind of crossing, but the highway was the only dry land for miles. 

Barney lowered the binoculars and pointed into the distance. Gordon stepped closer and followed his gaze over his shoulder. Blue-black metal gleamed against the horizon.

“Looks like one of the Combine’s hydro dams,” Sheckley said and scratched his beard. “I used to live in City 4. The whole thing was built over one of those. Cops used to chuck folks off the side.”

“Then the flooding’s artificial.” Alyx frowned, pacing the width of the highway. “If we can open the dam, we might be able to drain off enough water to get through.”

“What if it flows into the Black Sea?” Barney asked. His sign was sharp and crisp, perfectly professional. “The Geiger’s been going off all day. It’d be pretty pointless to get there and find out we irradiated the last good water in Europe.”

Alyx pulled a creased map from her bag and spread it out on the hood of the lead truck. She tapped her finger on a faded yellow line running north to south. “This is Combine camp, at the base of that peak. We made good time yesterday, which means…” She slid her finger down the line until it was halfway between the mountains and the Black Sea. On the map, they were only inches away, tantalizingly close. 

Barney leaned in, frowning. He wasn’t half as ruffled as Alyx looked, but that didn’t mean much. If Gordon woke up early enough he caught Barney shining his boots and checking the fall of his CP coat in their dorm’s mirror, ready for a uniform check from long dead superiors. Gordon could see his tenseness in the hard set of his jaw, the creases in his brow. 

“I don’t see any rivers feeding the sea near us,” he signed. “But it’s a prewar map. A lot could have changed.”

Alyx nodded. “Not a lot of options. We either get through or turn back the way we came, and we don’t have supplies to get all the way back to White Forest with the animals.”

“Let’s go,” Gordon said. “We don’t need to open it if we find out it’ll flood something. If we stay here, we don’t have that choice.”

Alyx nodded, but Barney frowned and shook his head. “We? Gordon, you’re down a couple pints and a HEV suit. You’re not exactly in fighting condition.”

“I’m always in fighting condition,” Gordon said. The creases in Barney’s brow turned into furrows and Gordon rushed to correct himself. “I mean I feel fine.”

“Weren’t we dragging you around camp by armpits last night?” Barney said, eyes narrowed. “I don’t want you lagging and getting hurt. The suit can take a bullet. You can’t.”

Gordon huffed and looked desperately to Alyx. “C’mon.”

“I want Gordon watching my back.” Alyx turned towards Griggs, tapping her foot. “Medic?”

Griggs shrugged. “Hasn’t keeled over on my watch. If doc says he’s fine, he probably is.” 

“I’ve seen him plow through antlions with a foot of rebar in his side,” Sheckley agreed. “I’d take his word for it.”

“We’re a team.” Alyx lifted her chin in silent challenge. “I’d feel better with an eye on both of you. Go grab some armor and a gun. Noriko’s probably stashed extras in the truck.”

Barney made to argue, but something flashed across his face and his hands fell to his sides. He stepped back behind Alyx, not meeting Gordon’s eyes.

Gordon glanced between them, then slowly climbed up into the cab. Noriko waved at him from behind the wheel and jabbed her thumb at the bed behind her. The thin cot was piled high with more munitions and gear than bedding. The mountain of stolen Combine vests and old guard helmets bristled with shotguns and rifles like a scared hedgehog.

Gordon tugged an armored jacket, the kind especially popular at White Forest, from the pile, careful not to jostle any of the hoppers mixed in. Someone had already painted over the Combine insignia on the sleeve with a brilliant orange lambda. 

He pulled it on. The padded plates were stiff and heavy, and the high collar scraped uncomfortably against his neck. Gordon fiddled with the straps, trying to find a position between rib cracking and nearly falling off. He grit his teeth. The HEV suit fit perfectly every time, like a second skin.

He finally gave up on the straps and grabbed a helmet and a submachine gun from the stack. Noriko saluted him as he hopped out of the cab and rejoined the party on the tarmac.

Barney raised an eyebrow at the dangling straps and buckles hanging miserably off his jacket. “Aw jeez doc, haven’t you worn one of these before?” 

Gordon scratched the back of his neck sheepishly as Barney slipped behind him and grabbed the straps. He fiddled with the latches and clasps for a moment before he yanked the belts tight, drawing the armored padding into alignment. He patted Gordon’s waist when he was done and gave the helmet’s chinstrap a gentle tug, the fabric of his gloves scratching against Gordon’s beard. “That’s better, huh?”

Gordon nodded, face warm despite the cool wind across the marsh. 

Barney turned to talk strategy with Alyx, and Gordon ran a thumb down his jaw, tracing Barney’s touch. Maybe there were some upsides to not having the HEV and its giant helmet on all the time. 

Griggs nudged his shoulder. “Hey. Hey Freeman.”

Sheckley and Griggs clapped their hands together and flexed in unison, wearing identical shit eating grins. The Vortigaunt vibrated in delight, putting their talons together in a loose approximation of the pidgin.

Gordon groaned and focused on loading a fresh clip into his gun, jamming the cartridge in with far too much force. Was it really that strange to enjoy your best friends company? To appreciate a little familiarity? They had always been like that at Black Mesa, fixing ties and adjusting collars, quiet little interruptions of each other's space. That was just what close friends did. Not that Gordon had had many close friends outside of Barney.

He nodded to himself. They were the ones making it weird. Projecting. It probably wasn’t their fault. Maybe the suppression field had given everyone horny-paranoia. Kleiner probably had mentioned something like that.

Alyx smacked his shoulder with the rolled-up map to get his attention. He grumbled and she rolled her eyes. “Alright. Griggs, Sheckley, let everyone in the convoy know where we’re headed. Keep on the defensive—there’s nowhere to go out here.”

“Gordon, Barney and I are on point. If we’re not back by midnight, start scouting alternate routes. We can’t get stuck out here.” She turned to the Vortigaunt and their antlion. “If you could give us a ride, that’d be great. We could use the backup.”

The Vortigaunt nodded and patted the antlion’s side. Their mouth moved, and Gordon instinctively glanced down for the HEV’s subtitles. 

Oh.

He frowned and he clambered onto the antlion’s back behind Alyx, wrapping his arms around her waist. Barney piled on behind them, one hand tight on the guard’s chiton, the other gripping Gordon's sleeve. The antlion knelt low to let the Vort climb onto its shoulders. They snapped the reigns and the enormous creature slowly picked its way towards the water, its passengers bouncing from side to side with its odd, uneven gait. 

Gordon lifted his feet as it splashed into the opaque water, grimacing at the pale film glistening across the surface. It reminded him of the thin skin of fat that used to collect on the top of leftover soup, if that soup had been absolutely festering with rot and radiation. He tried to breathe through his mouth, but that did little to help. The air didn’t just smell like a biohazard, it tasted like one.

He held Alyx’s jacket tighter, sinking his nails into the well worn leather as the antlion continued its long wade through the marsh. Aside from the occasional dead tree or boulder, there was nothing but stagnant, glassy water and a yellow sky. The dam drew closer and closer, larger and larger, the dark metal rising above them like ink spreading across paper. The Combine base had at least made an effort to hide away, digging deep into the mountain, but the dam had no pretenses. Its jagged spires drove into the low clouds, all hard angles and unforgiving lines. Gordon knew that architecture well. It had nearly crushed him like a tin can back in Nova Prospekt, had trapped him in a coffin in the winding tracks of the Citadel. 

Something approached in the corner of his vision. Gordon moved on instinct, raising his SMG and bracing it against his shoulder. Whatever it was, it barely rose above the water’s surface. Four pumping legs churned the sludge underneath a mound of scarred, lumpy skin. The arc between bullet and the creature crystallized in his mind, and he squeezed the trigger.

One crisp spring morning when Gordon was ten, his mother and father had taken him to the state fair. After they thrust a pen and paper into his hands and begged him to go socialize with the other kids, he had meandered into the petting zoo. Gordon had patted the sheep, fed the goats, and somehow wandered into the donkey’s pen. One thing led to another, and Gordon had ended up flat on his back in a crowd of screaming tourists and underpaid fair workers, poking at the bloody spot on his chest with detached fascination.

That was the only thing he could compare the recoil on the SMG to. Gordon clung to the gun like a lifeline as the knockback forced him off balance and towards the toxic water below. Alyx lunged, snatching him by the straps of his armored jacket, and together, she and Barney hefted him back onto the antlion. The Vortigaunt shot a worried look behind them, and Gordon saw more fleshy backs rising from the water, distended and deformed.

Gordon shook Alyx’s shoulder and pointed back at the dozen things splashing towards them. She blinked at them, their jagged shoulders and necks ending in hairless, bulbous masses and shouted something.

The Voritgaunt snapped the reins and the antlion charged, its long legs pinwheeling as it ran through the water. The things were gaining on them, and Gordon caught a glimpse of long, splintered claws as they lunged. Barney grabbed his pistol from its holster, letting the bulk of the pulse rifle hang at his waist, and fired into pale, trembling skin.

Gordon raised his SMG to help. Alyx smacked it out of his hands.

They were nearly to the dam, nearly up against a wall. Gordon felt his pulse quicken with fresh panic. He didn’t know what the weird, hairless animals were, but he knew better to assume that they were friendly. He’d survived all of Xen’s aggressive, dangerous wildlife, but that had been with a HEV suit and a good gun.

His stomach bounced into his throat as the antlion sprung into the air and skittered on to a black, floating dock, feet skidding on the wet surface. Alyx leapt off, immediately tucking in to a marksman’s crouch. Barney turned and lined up the sights. The dock jostled against its posts as they fired off shot after shot, gunsmoke curling in the stagnant air. Whatever the things were, they didn’t have much of a stomach for lead.

Alyx wiped her brow, panting, and kicked over the nearest body. It had managed to scramble on to the platform before the antlion drove a brutal kick into its side. It twitched faintly, chest rising and falling unevenly. Gordon hesitantly stepped over and took a long look at the animal.

It had ribs, sharp and jutting like an Outland’s refugee, and a fleshy slit down the midline of its belly. Four legs ended in bizarrely extended toes and spear-like nails. Its neck disappeared into a mass of spongy tissue, and Gordon carefully nudged it with his toe. A pair of withered and blackened claws emerged from under the mass of tumors.

“That’s a fucking zombie?” Barney said, squinting at the body. “That’s gotta be a wolf or something. I didn’t know crabs could latch onto anything other than people.”

“Maybe they didn’t have people to hunt. Selective pressure.” Alyx frowned at sores covering the animal’s mangy, peeling hide. “Do you think those are from chemicals in the water or…”

Barney shrugged, but Gordon knew.

“Radiation burns,” he said. He knew the way his skin had itched and peeled after spending too much time crossing pits full of glowing, nuclear waste. Stasis had healed everything but the memories. “Same thing gave it the tumors.”

Alyx grimaced and stared out at the marsh. “And with nothing new here to latch on to…”

“Nothing to stop it growing,” Barney finished. He gently kicked the body into the water, and no one made a move to stop him. “Do you wanna get going?”

“Yeah. I’m just wondering what it’s been eating, if there’s no other bodies for it to hijack.” Alyx sighed and tucked the hair that had shaken loose from her ponytail back into the elastic. “Open the dam, get out, get back.”

The Vortigaunt said something as they patted the antlion’s head.

Alyx nodded and started down the dock, waving for them to follow. “They’re going to stand watch in case any ‘Bine reinforcements show up.”   


Gordon and Barney nodded and fell in to step behind her. The dock bounced below their feet, knocking against the boats locked to it. The fiberglass of the skiffs had faded under the Outlands sun, and the boats’ guns had rusted and corroded where they lay across the bows.

Alyx frowned and ran a finger over a seam in the wall Gordon hadn’t even noticed. After a moment, she stepped back and unloaded a charge from the EMP tool into the metal. An access panel sprang open, its interior glittering with lights and scanners. She frowned at them. “Give me a second. I have to shift this to aux power.”

B arney held out his wrist, already yanking off the heavy gloves. 

She held up a hand. “Keep them on. You wouldn’t have the clearance for this anyways.”

Barney nodded stiffly and stepped back as she jabbed her EMP tool into a port. Electricity arched over the LEDs and wiring until every bulb was lit. She stepped through as the metal folded back into the walls of a long, low hall.

Soft, yellow light filtered through the thin windows, catching on the thick clouds of dust. Gordon grimaced as he sniffed the air. Something smelled like rotten citrus and bad leftovers, far from the usual blood and ozone tang of Combine. It wasn’t the only thing off: the floor and walls didn’t hum with the usual buzz of machinery and power Gordon associated with Combine spaces. It was more of a pulse, an uneven rhythm moving behind the panels.

“So,” Barney signed, falling into step with Gordon. “You sure you’re feeling alright?”

“Fine. Why?”

Barney stared at him. “You nearly went ass over ankles firing that SMG.”

Alyx nodded in agreement. “I thought moving targets were your favorite kind. What gives?”

Gordon frowned and massaged his shoulder where the butt of the gun had driven into it. The muscle protested, tender and smarting. There’d definitely be a bruise. “Recoil was weird. Normally isn’t that strong.”

“Yeah it is,” Barney said, narrowing his eyes. “Looked to me like any other gun.”

Gordon wrinkled his nose. “SMG’s don’t have kickback like that. Not even the shitty army ones.”

“It’s a submachine gun, Gordon,” Alyx said slowly. “Last time I shot one my back was sore for a week.”

He sniffed. “Never happened to me.”

“Oh my god.” Realization dawned on Barney’s face. He stopped short. “When was the last time you shot without the HEV?”

Gordon shrugged. “Black Mesa munitions training.”

“The one where you broke your nose on a shotgun butt?” Barney asked. “That was 20 years ago!”

Gordon grimaced and massaged his nose. He would have been more vain about it healing crooked if he hadn’t broken it again at the bottom of the trash compactor. “Eight months, actually.”

Barney groaned and rubbed his temples at the mention of time travel. Alyx just frowned, brow narrowed in confusion. “You mean your dad didn’t string up the old Combine skeleton in the backyard and teach you to nail headshots?”

Gordon gave her a flat look.

Alyx shook her head in tired sympathy. “Can’t believe you missed out on that milestone. I’m so sorry.”

There was a lot to unpack in that statement, but Gordon preferred to just throw out the whole suitcase. He started down the hall again, feeling the cold prickle of Barney’s glare on the back of his neck.

“Gordon.” Barney had his hands up and was inching towards him like he was cornering a wild animal. “Give me the gun.”

Gordon clutched the SMG to his chest and pretended to be extremely invested in his own dusty footprints.

“Gordon, I can see you looking at me. You know White Forest rules: if you can’t shoot it, you can’t have it.”

Gordon stroked the familiar metal of the barrel and looked pleadingly at Alyx, who was jogging alongside him. 

She gave him a pitying look and shrugged. “Should have spent more time at the range.”

Gordon whimpered as Barney pulled the SMG from his hands and slung it over his own shoulder to bounce gently against his pulse rifle. He shot a glare at Alyx. “What kind of wife are you?”

“The shotgun wedding kind,” Alyx said, basking in his melancholy. She rolled her eyes at his hopeful look. “You’re not getting a shotgun either.”

Gordon, somehow, deflated even further.

“Oh for the love of God—" Barney tossed him his pistol and a bag of ammo. “Just stop sulking.”

Gordon clipped the bag onto his belt and examined the dinky little pistol. It was made of cheap, pale Combine resin and weighed about as much as a nerf gun. He stared miserably at the peashooter in his hands and longed for the heft of a real weapon, the smell of gun oil and the press of the HEV suit holding his aim steady.

Alyx slapped his shoulder unsympathetically and steered him through a doorway to a small room. The floor was made of thick, clear resin, pressed in at all sides by exposed beams and wiring. “C’mon. Let’s get this thing going.”

She turned to the elevator’s control box, leaving him to glumly reflect on the SMG now bouncing against Barney’s hip. She frowned as she shifted plugs around the circuit board. “This is so weird. It needs to be on aux power too.”   
“It’s a power plant, isn’t it?” Barney signed as Alyx swung the box shut and hit the button on the top. “How the hell doesn’t it have power?”

“No clue.” She shook her head as the lift began to vibrate and rise. “Let’s just hope this place is still together enough to run the motors.”

Gordon tilted his head back and watched the heavy bundles of cables and tubes of stagnant fluid slide by. Above them, the elevator shaft disappeared into the blackness of the ceiling. Below, muddy water churned under the shaking glass of the platform.

“Just like Black Mesa, huh?” Barney said. His hands were wide, bouncy, but there was a tension to the gestures. “Remember the big lift in Sector G? Always on the fritz.”

Gordon nodded. Barney always took the stairs at White Forest. Some things you just didn’t question. “At least you don’t need to worry about Otis trying to fix it.”

That got a snort out of Barney. “Christ, Otis. I can’t believe I forgot about that guy.”

Alyx raised an eyebrow as she reloaded her gun. 

“Security guard,” Gordon explained. “Nice guy. Never knew when to quit when it came to repairs. Nearly took out the entire laser system trying to make Dr. Scott shut up.”

“At least you were too good for busywork,” Barney huffed. “MIT graduates are too valuable to help people get their arms out of vending machines.” 

“Oh, like babysitting the Antimass Spectrometer—" Gordon flicked his fingers out in the familiar A-M-S-M abbreviation, “wasn’t manual labor. There was a reason they had me in the Hazard Course, not the lab.”

“Sure, doc.” Barney rolled his eyes as the lift slowly stuttered to a halt. They had arrived in some sort of control room. It reminded Gordon of White Forest’s rocket launch chamber, buttons and levers trailing down every surface. The ceiling was packed with tubing and lined with dim flood lights, loose connections dangling down at eye level. A long, thin window cut the opposite wall in half lengthwise. Combine machine guns sat at the ready, their barrels sticking out into the open air.

Alyx’s eyes widened as she stepped towards the window. The dam towered over the surrounding landscape, tall enough that even Gordon felt his legs shake as he stared down at the ruin below. 

The marsh had hid the effects of the radiation and pollution well enough. It was easy to imagine minnows and trout just below the surface of the opaque water, to pretend that the rotting trees jutting out of the water were outliers, that the Combine hadn’t flooded an entire forest. What lay past the dam was irrefutable.

A crater stretched out below them like an enormous bowl sunk into the Earth. It must have been 300, no 400 meters wide at least, large enough that it felt like he was staring down into a flat painting, some horrid set piece. The dirt was packed tightly, the walls of crater cracked after thousands of days baking in the sun. At the bottom, Gordon could see bedrock poking through. Nothing grew among the wreckage. 

The three of them stared down at it for a long moment, processing the rubble, the trees knocked flat and scorched at the edges, until Alyx finally raised her hands.

“Nuke?” Alyx asked, fingers shaking. She took a deep breath and flexed them, the veins jumping under her dark skin. “I’ve never seen one of the craters. Barney?”

“Nah, you’ve seen one.” He grimaced, sticking his head out of the sentry’s nest and staring down at the wound below. “Probably too young to remember it though. Eli tried to keep you away from the transport’s windows.”

He sighed, wiping a loose strand of hair from his forehead. “Never this close though. Christ, cancer’s gonna get me before the Combine.”

Alyx frowned and turned to Gordon. “You’re a physicist. How long would this thing still be giving off rads?” 

Radiation. Right. Nuclear bomb, like the one that had fallen on Black Mesa. Standing on the black glass of ground zero, struggling to make out the words of his employer through a morphine haze. Limitless potential in the nucleus of the hydrogen atom.

“Gordon?”

Otis wouldn’t have survived the blast. Neither would any of the other scientists, the ones he had left behind in their hiding places as he crawled towards the surface. His coworkers, his old professors, his Deaf friends back in Cambridge—

A heavy weight fell over his shoulder. Gordon jumped, not expecting the warmth or the pressure, the gentle scrape of the CP gloves against his neck. Barney shook him gently. “Doc, are you with me?”

Gordon shook himself and slipped out from under the warm weight of Barney’s arm. The touch lingered for just a second and Gordon slammed the lid down on his hitching breath. Barney, Black Mesa, Seattle, MIT. Back in the box. 

“Doc?”

Barney had known him forever. It was normal that he’d read Gordon like a book. Good, really. Proof of a timeless friendship.

“I’d have to be an ecologist to tell you if its safe,” Gordon signed, grimacing at the crater. “Couldn’t tell you how the ash and debris dispersed. Unless you have a geiger...”

“Better get this done with fast.” Alyx squared her shoulders and marched to the control panel. She yanked an old supply crate over and sat on it as a makeshift chair as she worked. Slowly the lights came back on across the switch board and a high, quiet hum vibrated across the room’s metal paneling as her hands flew across the switches and keys. Gordon watched as monitors flickered on and Combine glyphs and an enormous 3D projection of the dam scrolled across them, as steam gently puffed from now-open pipes, as Alyx brough the dam back to life.

A message flashed across the screen and Alyx slammed her palms against the console hard enough to make Barney jump. She swore to herself and ran a hand through her tangled hair.

Barney and Gordon shared a look. Barney shook his head and stepped away from her, hands up.

“This whole place is falling apart. I don’t know when they last maintenanced anything. The supports are corroded, the power cells are leaking everywhere, and the dam controls are offline,” Alyx announced, gritting her teeth. “The only way to open the pipes is to hit the manual flood controls and hope it doesn’t crumble.”

“I’m not gonna like where those are, am I?” Barney said.

She stood, snatching her multitool and stuffing it back in her pocket, and let out a long breath, balling her hands into fists and then flexing them out, over and over. “They're next to the penstocks. We’ve got to go all the way down, through the maintenance tunnels.”

Barney and Gordon watched her pace the room a minute longer before she wiped the hair out of her eyes and set off for the hall opposite the one they came in through. They scrambled to keep up with her, boots skidding on the smooth floors.

The tunnels all looked the same. Sure, the individual parts may have been different, with different windows sending different shafts of musty yellow light across different dusty floors and bundles of heavy electrical cables, but there was a monotony that sunk deep into every Combine outpost. Gordon resolved not to get separated again. Five minutes in alone in these cramped, winding hallways and he’d be hopelessly lost.

He grimaced and shifted his grip on his pistol as they marched down another flight of stairs. Something buzzed in his teeth, but he couldn’t tell if it was his nerves playing tricks on him, the thrum and pulse of the dam or radiation coming off the crater outside. He wondered if the Combine resin was dense enough to block alpha particles, if their work would bring them all the way to ground zero. 

He stopped short as they rounded a corner and came face to face with something Gordon had never seen before, let alone in a Combine base.

A wall panel, a good five by five feet, had fallen off, and something had grown in the space behind it, an amalgamation of pallid green flesh and wiring. There were parts sticking out of it. A headcrab claw poked out at an odd angle, just above the long jaw and twisted snout of some sort of dog. The bottom of the thing was shredded, covered in a dried fluid Gordon couldn’t begin to name.

The smell was back, almost overpowering, and through the cloying smell of chemicals, he recognized it: rot.

Alyx and Barney seemed entirely unperturbed.

“Well, we found out where the zombies were eating,” she said, nudging a flap of ragged flesh that had been torn from the wall with her shoe. She moved her hands in motion he didn’t recognize, a flick of the hand that looked a bit like the sign for terminal. “No wonder they looked half dead.”

“Don’t know that word,” Gordon said. “I’ve never seen this before. What is it?”

“Combine B-I-O-E-L-E-C-T-R-I-C” she said, fingerspelling it out then repeating the pidgin again. “It’s a wetware matrix made of mammal tissue. This one is a bit uh, overgrown.” She waved at the coyote-headcrab amalgamation twitching in the half dead flesh. “They used it all the time for computers, batteries and bioreactors when I was a kid. Great first coding language, super easy to hack.” 

“When you were a kid?” Gordon blinked. “I thought the Combine never updated anything.”

She hummed, checking over the Combine bioelectric with an appraising look. “This base is at least 6 years old. They ditched mammal integration after we raided the Quarantine Zone.”

Alyx caught his eye, and Gordon saw something expectant there, like she had dropped a code word he should have recognized. In a moment, it was gone, and she was headed back down the maintenance tunnel, Barney a ghost at her side.

“It’s kind of a shame,” she said, continuing on as if the conversation had never faltered. “Some of our older terminals could use fresh transplants, but this one’s obviously cancerous.”

“If it can get cancer, why is an entire dam full of it next to a radioactive crater?” Gordon asked. 

“You know how much tender loving care the Combine puts into their troops,” Barney said, the ghost of a smile tugging at his lips. “Might have been a temporary set up. Might have been an advance base.”

Gordon felt a flicker of unease, one that rarely found him on the battlefield but sometimes kept him up at night, staring at the bottom of Barney’s bunk. What sort of empire could afford something of this magnitude for a scouting base or temporary barracks? Could afford to let it die pointlessly?

More than ever, the cadence of the dam’s utilities felt like a heartbeat, the pulse in a wrist connected to an enormous, distant whole. 

After a few more minutes following Alyx, they finally stumbled out onto a narrow catwalk overlooking a rushing channel of muddy water. The metal walkway looped halfway around the penstock room, disintegrated into a pile of torn scrap, then picked up on the opposite wall. Emergency lights cast a dim red glow over the room, catching the occasional flying clump of foam in their beams. On the other side, a heavy lever was outlined in glowing Combine blue.

Gordon looked down at the water below. The current was quick, but relatively shallow, probably only up to his thighs. Normally he avoided anything that could draw him through old rubble or a churning fan, but he’d be more than heavy enough to ford it with the-

Oh. Right.

Judging from Alyx and Barney’s frowns, they were thinking along the same lines. Alyx had her hands up, index fingers and thumbs together in a square as she inspected the gap in the catwalk. Barney was just behind her, watching the water roil below.

“I think I can climb over,” she said, stepping back and lining herself up with the rest of the catwalk. “Gimme space.”

Barney was already stepping back. Gordon frowned. “Are you sure? That’s at least six feet.”

“I’ll be fine. There’s no point wasting time, not when the convoy’s stuck out there.” 

Gordon raised his hands to argue, but was cut off by a sudden cascade of rubble from the ceiling. It bounced off the catwalk and was torn away by the brutal current, insulation and asbestos disappearing into the water.

He looked up into the wide, dark hole in the ceiling, and six bright blue eyes stared back at him, jittering and shaking in their sockets. Hunters.

The entire catwalk bounced and buckled as one of them swung down onto it, mandibles gnashing furiously, and Gordon grabbed Alyx by the shoulder. Her legs had locked up, he could tell by the way she stumbled as he yanked her out of the way of the hunter’s swinging leg. They had to get moving. The others were climbing down on their long claws and every second they spent with the hunters was a second closer to two holes bracketing her spine and stumbling around the train yard again, desperately looking for a medkit, for help.

Barney had thrown open a heavy door and was waving them through, pulse rifle in hand. The catwalk shook again and the muzzle of his gun flared, but Gordon’s vision had tunneled down to the exit and nothing else.

Their feet crossed the threshold, and Gordon felt the slam of the door behind them and the rattle of the floor as the hunters slammed themselves against it. The room was pitch black, with only a faint glimmer of light from the barrel of the pulse rifle, and smelled absolutely gangrenous. The floor was odd and uneven under his feet and he recoiled when he reached a hand to the wall and felt it touch something slick and spongy.

A warm hand fumbled against his shoulder, and he took it, feeling the worn leather of Alyx’s fingerless gloves. After a moment, Barney lit an emergency flare, casting a red glow over his and Alyx’s anxious faces as well as the room they’d locked themselves in.

Gordon’s first thought was that he had found his way back to the border-world, with its towering organic factories and bloody landscape. The walls pulsed and heaved with the same pale flesh as before, glistening with faint moisture. Parts of it had shriveled into black necrosis, inflamed at the edges, leaving the walkway under his feet uncovered. Flooding had claimed the lower half of the room, and a ladder lead pointlessly down into the water.

Alyx leaned back against the guardrail, hugging her arms and watching the door shake. Barney stepped past her, waving the flare out in front of him like a talisman as he scanned the room.

Gordon took his place against the rail next to her, their arms brushing against each other. Without the thick heels of the HEV suit, she was nearly as tall as him. There was a thin sheen of sweat across her brow and he could see a tendon jumping in her neck. 

“Sorry,” Alyx said, wincing as the hunters slammed into the door hard enough to make it bounce on its hinges. “I’ll be fine in a minute. Once I figure out how we’re going to get out of this.” 

Gordon nodded and let her lean on him. The chord between them vibrated in his chest, taunt and strained. “Hey.”

“Yeah?” 

“What is this place?” Gordon asked, waving a hand at the fleshy walls and broken machinery. “Tell me about it.”

“Distractions? Really?” Alyx rolled her eyes, but some of the tension in her face faded. She shifted against the guardrail, pulling herself up a bit straighter. “This is power storage, probably. Do you see the glands in those alcoves? Biological batteries. Probably reserve power.”

“I thought the bioelectric stuff was for computing.”

“It is, but it’s only compatible with other mammal-assimilated machines,” she said. “They culture the batteries specially to deal with the acid. That stuff’s super reactive—"    


She paused mid sentence, blinking. “I know how we’re getting out of here.”

“You’re… going to blow up the hunters? With us two feet away?” Barney asked dubiously. 

“No! I mean, kinda.” She frowned, pacing the length of the walkway. “We’re close enough to the penstocks that if I rigged something, it’d probably take a big chunk of the dam out. If we can’t get to the manual release, that might be the next best thing. And it would get rid of those… things.”

She knelt at the base of one of the alcoves and pulled a narrow chip from the bag at her hip. “Barney, grenades.”

Wordlessly, Barney placed two in her hands and stepped back as she set to work, weaving wires through the chip and detonation mechanisms, occasionally pausing to type things into her multitool. 

Barney gestured for Gordon to come over, flare in hand. He waved it over the stagnant water, and beneath its oily sheen, Gordon caught a glimpse of emergency lights and a tall door. 

“I know Alyx is figuring out the big picture stuff, but I think that may be a way out.”

Gordon grimaced at the fetid water and the… things floating on it. He couldn’t tell if they were wood, flesh or something else bobbing lifelessly on the surface. “I think even being near this is giving me blood poisoning.”

Barney nodded, running a hand through his hair. “Kinda the problem, yeah. I think there’s an emergency switch on the other catwalk over there—" at Gordon’s raised eyebrow, he lifted the flare just enough to catch an identical set of metal guardrails on the other side of the room—“but I don’t know how the hell we’re supposed to get over there. Without the HEV, you’d basically be skinny dipping.”

“I’ll do it,” Alyx said. “I’m the lightest of us. The debris should hold me long enough to jump across.”

“We don’t even know what they’re made of,” Gordon said, frowning. “If you miss a jump...”

She shrugged. “Do you think you can make it?”

Gordon bit the inside of his cheek and slowly shook his head. “Can you?”

Alyx slapped her hands together like a boxer dusting their gloves as she settled into a runner’s crouch, lining herself up with the nearest floating pile of garbage. It looked vaguely like a table. “Guess we’ll find out, huh?”

Gordon grabbed her arm, trying to haul her back from the edge. His grip felt weak and spindly around her bicep as he moved his free hand in rusty pidgin. “What do we do if you fall? How are we supposed to pull you out?”

S he grimaced, her bicep tensing under his fingers. “Hunters aren’t stupid. They’ll get in eventually. Let’s just get this over with.” 

Gordon shook his head and held firm.

Alyx huffed and yanked her arm away, her teeth flashing in the red light. “What’s the point of worrying about it? We get chased around by Combine and do stupid shit every day. What if one of the trucks breaks? What if I get skewered by some Combine science project? What if the HEV breaks and you start bleeding out in a fight?” She flung her hands out. “It’s pointless.”

Gordon winced, feeling the skin crawl on his arms. It was a low blow and she knew it. “That’s different. This is just… meaningless risk. There’s got to be a better way to get out.”

“C’mon, Gordon. Don’t you trust me?”

“This isn’t about trust.” He shot a desperate look at Barney, who didn’t meet his eyes. “Barney?”

“It’s her choice,” Barney said slowly, his face a flat mask. “If Alyx thinks she can do it, I think she can do it.”

Something flashed across Alyx’s face, but it was gone in a second. She set her jaw and crouched low, bouncing on her back leg as she prepared for a sprint. 

She was off like a shot, her footfalls making the entire walkway jump on its scaffolding. Alyx leapt, falling forwards for balance as her shoe just barely hit the floating piece of rubble. She clambered on, her sneakers just barely grazing the water, and pulled herself into another crouch, lunging for the next island before it could sink any further.

Her hands and knees skidded on the surface, and she was clawing at the edge for some semblance of grip. Gordon could feel his heart thud in his throat, but there was nothing he could do for her. 

He couldn’t watch this. Always the coward.

“Why’d you let her go?” Gordon asked, waving a hand in front of Barney’s nose to get his attention. “She’s going to get herself killed on those things.”

“She’s a grown woman,” Barney said. “And our squad leader. Besides, have ever tried to make Alyx do something she doesn’t want to?”

“Weren’t you the one saying she was having trouble adjusting? That she needed our help?” Again, Barney wouldn’t meet his eyes. “I promised you I’d try. What happened?”

“Alyx doesn’t want our help. She just wants our respect.”

“Is respect just going along with whatever she tells you? Even if it gets her killed?”

Barney shook his head. There was a thin trickle of sweat down his brow, and even though his uniform was perfect, Gordon could see the shadows under his eyes. “Look, we can hash this out when we’re not in the middle of a crater getting chased around by baby-striders. She’s already out there. Lets just stick to the plan.”

They stood in silence for a long moment, Barney watching Alyx and Gordon watching Barney.   
“I wish I had broken the tanks,” Gordon admitted. “I hate seeing you two fight like this.”

Barney paused, watching Alyx stumble on a floating terminal case for a long moment. “I don’t want that weighing on your conscience, doc.” 

“It wouldn’t. You know I… don’t do that.” It felt weird admitting it outloud, acknowledging what Black Mesa had uncovered in him. No one had ever mentioned it, but Gordon knew letting the Resistance know their hero was some unfeeling murderer would probably be bad for morale. “Next time, just let me.”

“Gordon, that’s… I mean, it’s my job to—"

“You don’t have a job anymore,” Gordon said, unable to keep from rolling his eyes. “You ditched it to go join a hippie commune in the Russian steppe.”

That startled a laugh out of Barney, and he slapped his hand over his mouth as Alyx glanced back at them, brow furrowed. “Christ, Gordon, don’t make me laugh when she’s out there.”

“Will make a note of that,” Gordon said, his sign too shaky and clipped to be deadpan. “I’ll try to be less hilarious and interesting.”

She was, at least, almost there. With one last jump, she scrambled onto the far platform, her boots sending a shower of rust into the fetid water. She brushed her knees off, grabbed what little of the lever hadn’t been subsumed by bioelectric, and gave it an almighty heave.

The bars on the walkway shuddered as a dim crack of light appeared below the surface and the water level slowly began to drop. Barney raised the flare higher and grimaced at the thick black slime coating the now uncovered walls. The smell was unbearable.

Alyx waved and gave them two big thumbs up. 

After a few minutes of waiting and shuffling through the pockets of his jacket yielded nothing but a wad of dried plant matter and a few pills of what was either motrin or Combine amphetamines, the water had drained down enough to cross. Alyx hopped down, wincing as she picked her way across the rubble and slime strewn across the ground. Barney and Gordon joined her on the lower level, ignoring the rickety ladder in favor of skidding down a spongy deposit of slime that had caked into a corner.

He gave a quick look back at the catwalk as they slipped out of the room. The door to the penstocks had stopped rattling on its frame. Gordon couldn’t tell if that was a good sign. 

Their impromptu drain let out onto a narrow, half-flooded hallway. The ceiling was so low Gordon had to bow his head to keep from bashing it on exposed pipes and dead bioelectric. He tried not to think too hard about the stagnant water seeping into his sneakers as Alyx led them through the twists and turns. 

Eventually they reached another enormous shaft leading down into rushing water and up into indistinct blackness. If Gordon had been in a human building, he might have called it a freight elevator, but separating the concept of passenger and cargo had never been the Combine’s priority. Worse, there wasn’t a platform this time.

“Can you call it?” Barney asked as Alyx marched towards the rickety service ladder tacked on to the wall.

“I’m not waiting for them to catch up,” she said and stuffed the multitool in her pocket. “We’re climbing.”

She hauled herself up onto the narrow bars and started her ascent. As always, Barney and Gordon followed. The cold metal dug into Gordon’s palms, scraping hard against his calluses and the bruise on his shoulder drilled into the muscle with each rung as he struggled to keep up with Alyx and Barney. He glanced down and winced when he saw that they’d only made it about twenty feet up from their floor. He grit his teeth and focused on the long climb ahead.

A stream of dusty sunlight filtered in through the windows above, lighting up the uncomfortably organic shapes of the Combine’s utilities. Gordon could see the dim glimmer of hallways where the elevator stopped, the doors cut into the walls with no care for sharp edges or safety. Above him, Barney’s ass was informing him just how tightly cut the Metrocop uniforms were.

God dammit.

Gordon huffed, trying to drown out the traitorous voice in the back of his mind like a marine on his first waterboarding assignment. Nothing to have a crisis about. There was only a ladder, a ladder that needed climbing.

He was about to resolve to spend the next ten minutes of just staring at the flat resin wall the rungs were sunk into when the sun caught a flash of iridescent blue. He peered back over his shoulder, only to lock eyes with the entire trio of hunters. They had dug their needle talons into the opposite wall of the shaft, clinging to the piping and wires like three-legged monkeys.

Gordon slammed his hand against the wall, feeling it reverberate under his palm. Alyx looked down and visibly paled at the sight of them. She immediately picked up the pace, clambering hand over hand towards the next elevator stop with Barney just behind her. Gordon kept his eyes on the hunters, grabbing for the slick rungs by touch alone and hoping he didn’t fumble. 

The hunters were picking their way around the circumference of the room, swinging between bundles of wire and matrices of pipework on their talons. Their massive, swiveling eyes gleamed with unnatural intelligence and something else, something more basic and unyielding than any Combine gene editing could ever create. If the hunters knew hunger, if they could eat at all, then they looked at Barney, Alyx and Gordon like the first meal they had seen in years. They were getting closer, ever closer, and Gordon’s weak body couldn’t keep up the pace. There was nowhere to run, nowhere to hide.

Barney’s hand seized his wrist and hauled him onto the platform above, dragging him across the cold resin on his stomach. Gordon shot one last look back at the hunters as he scrambled to his feet. The hallways whizzed by, brief flashes of the crater flicking past through the occasional window. Another staircase, another ladder up to a catwalk, another glimpse of cyan in the corner of his eye.

His knees screamed as he vaulted a collapsed pipe and landed poorly, looking for shock absorption that wasn’t there. Immediately, Barney had a hand around his wrist, hauling him up and tugging him along, but it was still lost time. There was too much rubble in their path to look back and check how much the hunters had gained on them and the uncertainty burned.

God, he wished he had his HEV suit, even just the helmet. At least then he’d be able to track the hunters’ calls.

Bright blue flechettes flew past his ear, close enough he could smell the chemicals on them, and embedded in the wall. On instinct, he yanked Barney close, grabbing him tight as the explosives went off and sent them rolling. 

Gordon felt the wind go out of him as the percussive blast hit, and froze wheezing on the ground. In the corner of his eye, he could see the hunters leaping towards them. 

Alyx seized him by the shoulders and pulled him up, putting herself between him and the synths in one smooth motion. The muzzle of her gun sliced through the air and Gordon counted three shots. Her aim was true. Bright yellow blood spurted from the closest hunter’s eye, making it flinch and stagger. Then she was off again, racing down the hallway as Gordon and Barney struggled to keep up.

“Need to blow the dam!” Alyx signed frantically, her gestures muddied by the multitool in her hand. “Now!”

Gordon shook his head, tapping his fingers together over and over. “Not with you in it! Too dangerous!”

“No time!”

Alyx’s thumb slammed on the button, and for a moment, there was nothing. Gordon felt it before he saw it. A distant rumble shook deep beneath his feet and suddenly it was all around him, chips of concrete and resin fluttering from the ceiling. Even the hunters froze, stumbling around as they tried to figure out what had happened to their post.

Then, the hallway caved in. 

Gordon only barely managed to yank Alyx back from the falling rubble as the heavy Combine machinery punched through the ceiling, shattering across the floor and exposing huge masses of tumorous bioelectric. Dust billowed through the air until it was nearly opaque and Gordon found himself hacking up a lung as the floor convulsed beneath him, blindly feeling for Barney and Alyx in the haze. There was something chemical in the smoke, something that made his temples throb and his throat go dry, leaving everything a blur until he was clambering over the debris, chasing the last spot of sunlight filtering in from the roof with a hand around Alyx’s wrist and Barney at his side.

The Vortigaunt stared at them with wide eyes from the antlion’s back when they pulled themselves from the wreckage, choking on the dust as they crested the mountain of twisted metal and meat.

“Christ,” Barney signed, coughing. He paused, panting, and wiped the stinging dust from his eyes. “Did you get them?”

Alyx glanced back at the crumbling dam, the teetering I-beams and plating, and grimaced. Even under a layer of dirt and flecks of rubble, Gordon could see the color had drained out of her face. “Honestly, I don’t care. If they want the dam, they can have it. Let’s get out of here.”

Barney frowned, but she was already jogging back to the antlion. She hitched her leg over its side and budged up to make room for Gordon. The antlion thrummed nervously under him as he grabbed Barney by the wrists, straining to pull him onto the creature’s back. 

Behind them, a hunk of metal shifted and fell, crashing into the water with an enormous splash. The Vortigaunt struggled with the reigns, trying to calm the antlion as it startled, bucking back on its hind legs. Alyx fell back on Gordon, futilely grabbing for its neck and slamming him back onto Barney. He barely had time to react before the antlion was off like a shot, bounding across the water.

Gordon dug his nails into the ridges of its chitin and glanced back. Barney had found handholds in the crease of its thorax and Gordon’s coat, and was holding on for dear life. Behind them, the crumbling dam retreated into the distance, as lifeless as ever.   
It wasn’t long before the highway crept back into view, asphalt cutting a jagged line through the dead forest. The trucks were in the same position they had left them, shut off to conserve fuel. Gordon could see Noriko in one of the cabs, rubbing her hands together to keep out the cold with the heat off. 

The antlion slowed as it reached land, pacing in circles until Gordon, Barney, Alyx and the Vortigaunt managed to disembark. 

“Are you okay, Boss? What’s with the smoke?” Mary asked, scrambling from the cab of her truck, Arlene just behind her.

Gordon blinked. Boss? He’d only seen the other rebels use that sign for Eli, respectfully tapping a clawed hand to their shoulders as they gossiped about the Vances.

Alyx took it in stride, holstering her pistol. “The dam was empty, but not empty enough. We had some company and ended up taking the whole thing down.”

Mary raised her hands and opened her mouth to say something else, but was cut off as Arlene grabbed a grenade from her belt and lobbed it over their heads. The five of them turned to see it detonate beside a large stone outcropping, sending a pair of the hunters scrambling from their cover.

Alyx went for her gun, her eyes wide. “How did they—”

“Not dead if you don’t see a corpse,” Gordon signed with his free hand as he pulled Barney’s horrible little gun from his pocket and clicked the safety off.

The hunters surged forwards, their claws carving long divots in the crumbling asphalt. Mary reached for the rifle slung over her shoulder and Barney grabbed his pulse rifle, but the hunters danced through the hail of bullets with a grace that didn’t fit their size. Alyx threw herself out of their path, unloading another clip into one’s heavy hide, but they didn’t chase her. They had found softer, weaker prey.

Stupidly, uselessly, Gordon raised Barney’s pistol, firing it as fast as the chamber could reset. The bullets did nothing but leave a few deep pits in the hunter’s armor as they gnashed their mandibles together and spat darts. Gordon leapt for cover, tucking into a roll as he dove behind the nearest truck. The fletchettes swept across the trailer, sprouting from the metal in a thin blue line. He had a second to watch them flicker, shaking as their fuels mixed and sparked inside the capsules. Another heartbeat and they went off, exploding in a stripe of blue fire.    


The trailer’s thin walls tore like paper, the tires went flying and the entire truck tottered back and forth before toppling over under the onslaught. The eighteen wheeler slammed the ground hard enough to make Gordon’s teeth rattle as he ran from his cover, dodging shrapnel.

He realized his mistake immediately. The hunters turned in unison towards their pest and before Gordon could fire a shot, they were on him. One struck a leg across his back, knocking him face first onto the cracked asphalt and sending his pistol and glasses skittering across the pavement.

Something scraped against his back, needle points slicing through his armor and dragging across his skin. Gordon grit his teeth, waiting for them punch through his chest like the tines of a fork, but instead he found himself flying, tossed in a blur of metallic chitin and brilliant blue eyes. 

He twisted in the air, staring down at the hunters’ eager faces as they jostled each other. He’d forgotten they knew how to play.    
The one with an oozing crack in its hide caught him, grabbing him by the thigh with surprising gentlness. The world spun as he swung down, no HEV suit tourniquets to keep the blood from rushing to his head. His fingertips scraped the road for a second before he was thrown again, wind whipping his face as he arced towards the other hunter. Its eyes bulged in their shallow sockets as it angled itself towards him, sharp mandibles raised to snatch him out of the air.

Pointlessly, Gordon held out his hands, as if that would do anything more than give the Synth a handle.   


A blur of metal slammed into the hunter and Gordon found asphalt rocketing up to meet him instead of jaws. Before he could even process the hunter crumpled under a huge water tank, something caught him again, jerking him around like a ragdoll. 

He strained, trying to get a look at the other hunter, but it was still on the other side of the road, a burst of electricity tearing into its shoulder. It was then that he caught a flash of orange in the corner of his eye; Alyx, brandishing the gravity gun with murder written on her face.

She hefted it to her side and Gordon was sent rolling across the road, bouncing on the pavement. Stars popped behind his eyelids like flashbulbs as he finally came to a stop in the shadow of one of the still standing trucks. Someone had their hands on his shoulders, dragging him away from the firefight. Gordon watched his heels bonk against the debris as the world tilted around him.   


They propped him up against one of the tires. Griggs was there, flashing a light in his eyes as Mary handed him a medkit and rag that stunk of potato vodka. 

They were talking, clipped and tense. Mary was checking his back as Griggs pointed at the flashlight and mouthed for him to follow it with his eyes. Behind him, a Vortigaunt ran towards the hunters, talons sparking with green electricity. Noriko was on their heels, hefting her RPG launcher over her shoulder.

They didn’t have time for this. Staying in one spot would just leave them open to crossfire and Gordon knew the One Free Man wasn’t the only one who needed medical attention. He wasn’t letting someone get run through by hunters to save his own skin. 

Gordon grabbed the shotgun at Grigg’s feet and made to stand, hands easily finding the stock and trigger despite his swimming vision. Immediately, Mary shoved him back against the tire, holding him down and yanking up his sleeve. He struggled, but without the HEV it was pointless. Her grip was iron.

“Holy shit, Doc,” Griggs signed. “Do you  _ want _ to get skewered?”   


“Alyx, Barney—"    


Griggs ripped open his duffel bag, pulling a vial of blue fluid and a syringe from it. He drew up the plunger until the needle was half-filled and set it on his knee. “Doc, the only thing you’re gonna do out there is get yourself killed,” he said and wiped down the crook of Gordon’s arm with the rag. He lined up the needle and stuck him. “Without that suit, you’re a sitting duck.”

The shot was just antlion medicine, but Gordon crumpled against the truck anyways, watching the battle with bated breath as Griggs checked his head for welts.

The hunter Alyx had smashed the tank into was dead, eyes lolling and unfocused. The other had taken hits too, synth blood dribbling from the joints in its armor. Alyx and Barney flitted around it, bobbing like fly-fishing lures as the Vortigaunts took potshots. 

It was almost like a dance. The hunter would zero in on Alyx as she dragged in a piece of debris, struggling with the bulk of the gun, and Barney would fire off a spray from his AR-2, grabbing its attention just long enough for Alyx to swing the rubble into it. The hunter would lunge and she’d go scrambling back, opening it to a salvo of electricity and bullets.

Gordon had never seen them so in sync. Every move was choreographed. The hunter launched a volley of flechettes at them, and Alyx caught them with a loose tire, tossing them out into the water as Barney lined up a shot. It lunged and she darted out of the way, falling back behind him as he parried it, spitting more bullets into its chitin. She pulled another hunk of twisted metal towards herself, the sharp splinter whirling through the air like a fan blade, and with a flash of orange light, it skewered through the hunter like a spear. The thing lay twitching in the pavement as they high fived, giddy, anxious smiles lighting up their faces.

Gordon breathed a sigh of relief as Mary finally stepped back. “The Uprising must have been a real spectacle, huh?” she said as Barney and Alyx ran to them. “Would have liked to see that.”

“Are you okay?” Alyx said, falling into a crouch and checking the back of his neck, the base of his ribs. She was saying something else, but Gordon couldn’t read her lips.

Griggs clapped a hand on her shoulder and gently pulled her back. He said something, and the tension in her shoulders eased. She pulled away, kneeling on her heels. “Thank god, you’re okay. When that—that  _ thing _ got you, I—" she took a long breath and let it go. “You’re okay.”

Gordon nodded, wiping a hand through his beard and frowning as it came away covered in rubble. 

“Do me a favor, don’t let that happen again,” he said and handed Gordon’s glasses back to him. The frown he was giving Gordon was almost as bad as Alyx’s wide-eyed stare. “Seein’ you thrown around like a ragdoll was….” He trailed off and offered Gordon a hand.

Gordon let Barney pull him to his feet. He could feel bruises starting to form under the heavy padding of his jacket, barely kept in check by the antlion serum. There was a fresh crack in the left lens of his glasses.0

“Not to ruin the moment here but, uh,” Griggs paused and leaned his head out, trying to catch a glimpse of something around the corner of the truck. “Boss, you should see this.”

Gordon recognized that tone and Alyx did too. She took a moment, shutting her eyes and pulling her shoulders back. “Alright,” she said, following him back out into the open. “What is…”

Gordon, stumbling along just behind, nearly knocked her over when she stopped short. 

He had almost forgotten about the truck. The eighteen-wheeler was flat on its side, undercarriage smoking and steaming slightly in the cool air. The thin metal of its trailer had split like the rind of an overripe fruit, and feed bags and dozens of animal cages were scattered everywhere. A dog that might have been a very mangy wolf or a particularly impressive fox chewed at the bars of its carrier. Rabbits sat trembling against the chicken wire of a converted winebox, staring up at the three of them with frantic, wide eyes.

Gordon risked a glance at Alyx as she knelt and righted the rabbit’s crate. Her face had gone stony, her brow creased in hard lines.

Arlene appeared behind them, a frown tugging at her lips. She wasn’t the only one. The rest of the convoy was slowly assembling behind Alyx, Vortigaunts and humans watching her with desperate, silent intensity. It was dangerous to leave the trucks unmanned out in the open, especially after a hunter attack, but Gordon had a feeling they were dealing with something far more dangerous than the Combine.

Alyx turned to face her assembly. She raised her hands, speaking and signing at the same time like they did for the nightly announcements at White Forest. “How much free space is left in the other trucks? Does anyone have last night’s inventory?”

Noriko shuffled out of the crowd, holding out a thick, spiral-bound notebook for Alyx. She took it and studied the pages, occasionally saying something to Noriko as she hovered over her shoulder. Finally, she shut the book and gave it back to her, and she ran back into the throng as quickly as she had left it.

“Arlene, Griggs, Sheckley and the Vorts,” she signed crisply. “Start moving crates out of the truck. Water and food come first. Leave the animal rations. Insects and herbivores get priority.”

Mary raised a hand and said something.

Gordon saw Alyx’s hands twitch into fists, but it was gone in an instant. Alyx made a point to never let other Resistance members see her really angry. “We’re not going to get the truck back over, even with the antlions. It’s too heavy.”

“Mary, Noriko, Barney, you’re with me. We’re going to cut any fat in the other trucks,” she said. “We need all the space we can get.”

Wordlessly, Barney and Mary moved to join her. Noriko didn’t, working her jaw like she was chewing on something especially bitter.

“The trucks were at capacity when we left. Even if we move out all non-essentials and pack the cabs, we can’t fit all the animals,” Noriko said, glancing down at the nearest cage and the pigeons frantically flapping around inside it. “What do we do with them?”

Alyx set her jaw, her knee bouncing with tension. She took a deep breath. “We have to let them go.”

“What?” Noriko waved a hand at the stagnant water and lifeless forest around them. “They can’t survive out here. They’ll starve or choke on whatever shit the Combine’s put in the water.”

“I know. But it’s better to suffer free than die in a cage,” Alyx said, her sign firm and even. “We let them go.”

Slowly, the crew of the convoy began to nod and sign their agreement. Alyx pulled a pad and a pen from her pocket and started down the line of trucks, tapping the ballpoint against the paper. Barney trailed behind her, always her right hand.

Gordon followed, wincing at the battering ram in his skull. The antlion serum was probably the only thing keeping him from a serious concussion, but he was still bitter that it didn’t stop the pounding headache.

“Are we starting at the back and working our way up?” he asked, squinting against the sun on the water. “Or doing the trucks with non-essentials?”

“Something like the first one,” Alyx said. “Don’t worry about it. You can go wait in one of the trucks. This… shouldn’t take too long. There’s not a lot we can get rid of.”

Gordon stared at her, the ash thick in her hair, the sheen of sweat on her brow, her fingers anxiously clicking the pen over and over. “Don’t do this alone.”

“I’m not alone,” Alyx said automatically, jabbing her pen at Barney. 

Gordon grimaced, trying to ignore Barney’s sidelong glance. “You know what I mean.”

She huffed. “It doesn’t matter. If something comes after us, if there were more hunters in the base, I’m not making the same mistake twice.” Something must have shown in Gordon’s face and she sighed, running a hand through her tangled hair. “Sorry, but those are orders.”

She turned, marking something off on her clipboard. “C’mon Barney. We’ve got work to do.”

Barney glanced between her and Gordon, and gave him an apologetic grimace. “It’ll be okay. Promise.”

Gordon watched them go, poking at the wet spots on the inside of his jacket where the hunter’s pincers had broken skin, then turned and made the familiar walk of shame back to Griggs and Sheckley’s truck. The door was unlocked and Gordon resumed his post on the narrow trucker’s bed, staring dejectedly at the dashboard.

They were opening the cages now, knocking deadbolts loose and shaking padlocks free. There wasn’t much gentleness to it, not enough time for it, not with the taste of radioactive smoke on their tongues and the dam so close. Even if it was empty and crumbling, the sight of it was an implicit threat. 

A deer was the first to go. It sprang free of the crate the moment Arlene pried it open, long, delicate legs propelling it into the air. It landed in the water, the dull grim and oil-sheen of it staining its fur as it struggled to keep its head above the surface. A flock of White Forest’s prized eating-pigeons followed, their shiny wings dulled by the dust in the air. Animals, scrambling for a doomed future.

“Pretty goddamn depressing, huh,” Sheckley said as he hopped back into the cab, back from trying to salvage the cargo from the dead truck. He sighed and gave their hitchhiker a pitying look. “Probably a metaphor in it or some shit.”

Griggs shoved open the other door and chucked his duffel into the back. “Sheck, we cannot afford you getting back into poetry.” He gave their hitchhiker a pitying look, grimacing guiltily. “You can lie down. Probably should, with the week you’ve had.”   


Gordon settled on the stiff cot, feeling the springs creak under him as he tried to find a position that was comfortable without looking like he was too cozy on their bed.

Griggs slid into the driver’s seat and gunned the engine, and Gordon watched two wings of filthy water spray up on either side of the truck as they barreled across the mostly-drained highway. He had been expecting a conversation, more prying into the torrid affair everyone had decided he was having, but the two of them didn’t even talk to each other as they drove. Once, Sheckley reached out and gripped Grigg’s hand on the wheel, but that was it. 

Just like Barney, always touching, always wearing those filthy Metrocop gloves, the ones that never let the bloodstains out no matter how hard they scrubbed. A warm hand on his back, his shoulder, his arm.

Gordon realized what his coworkers would think if they caught him mulling over the Vegas trip and how tenderly Barney had supported his head while the paramedics came, and shoved the memories away, sullenly resigned to just the company of his own headache.

The hours slid by in silence as Gordon watched the tips of the trees go by and the sky turn from dingy yellow to red to the pale purple of twilight. The cab bounced gently with every pothole, sending Griggs and Sheckley’s belongings jumping across the floor. He might have slept, but at this point Gordon was an old hand at focusing on nothing at all, and sometimes it was hard to tell the difference between dozing and dissociating.

The truck stalled to a stop eventually, and Griggs unclipped his seat belt and collapsed against the seat, stretching like a cat. Gordon wiped the grit out of his eyes and winced as he got up and shuffled to the door, blinking hard against the headlights of the other trucks.

The first thing he noticed as he cracked the door open was the smell. It was cool and salty, the same scent of dead algae and organic matter baking in the sun that had always made his mom crinkle her nose. Gordon breathed it in deeply, trying to hold it in his lungs.

He stepped down onto the sand, grinding the heavy soles of his boots into it just to look at the imprint. It was nearly black, a smooth plane of charcoal disappearing into the dusk as it banded the water in front of him. 

It shouldn’t have been novel, seeing real open water. Gordon’s Deaf Club back at Cambridge had occasionally rented a van and hauled ass out to Cape Cod for the day, and Highway 17 had been nothing but coast, but the Black Sea was different. 

There were no dead ships sunk into the silt, no deep holes in the sand where the antlions had burrowed, just an expanse of water stretching out like a pane of black glass as he marched up the convoy. The moon was rising, casting soft light across the dark, still surface. 

Alyx and Barney were standing on the sea’s edge, the water licking at the toes of their boots. Gordon waved to them, a smile cracking across his face. They were here, safe and in one piece despite everything. “We made it!”

Alyx nodded, absently rifling through her bag. “We made it.”

“Do we set up camp or let the animals out first?” 

Barney shot him a look over her shoulder, his brow all scrunched up. Gordon couldn’t read it. “What?”

“Gordon,” Barney signed slowly. “We can’t hear anything. No birds, no bugs, no animals, nothing.”

“Forget hearing, just look at the place. They said there’d be—" Alyx waved her hands expansively, wordlessly. “There was supposed to be something  _ alive _ out here, and there’s nothing but ash and water.”

Gordon reached down and cupped a handful of the black sand. It smeared dark across his fingers, and when he looked closer he could see that the grains themselves were pale, mixed in with a dark powder. 

Soot. 

An endless expanse of soot, enough to dye an entire shore black.

“We were going to do tests on the water anyways, right?” Gordon said quickly. “It’s dark, and we’ve only just gotten here. It might just look bad—"

“It always looks bad!” Alyx’s hand sliced down and out from her lips like a knife. “Because it always is—everywhere we go is dead and dying!” She reached back into her bag and tore out an old book with a heart shaped lock, jamming her finger against the water stained pages.

“Alyx—"

“I know you’re not from around here, I know you’re not used to this, but this is what always happens!” She pushed the book into Gordon’s hands, the cover wet and cold on his bare fingers. “We’re not the first people to starve out here. We’re not going to be the last.”

Gordon fumbled uselessly with the book as she started to pace, her dragging heels digging long furrows in the sand. “If we wanted to kill a bunch of animals, all we had to do was grab a couple spare pistols and save ourselves the gas. Instead we’re stuck in the middle of the wasteland, hundreds of miles from home with a nuclear crater and a hive of angry, starving Combine on the way back!”

Barney glanced up the shore, towards the trucks where the rest of the convoy was clambering out of the cabs and hitching up the antlions. At this distance, their faces were unreadable, but they’d make their way down the sand eventually. They would have questions. 

He grabbed Alyx’s shoulder and tried steering her away from the trucks, signing in pidgin with his free hand. “C’mon Alyx. You’re going to spook them.” 

Alyx wrested her arm away. “I’m pretty sure that Vance’s kid losing it isn’t the big issue here.”

“It will be. They’re going to look to you for how they should react, and if they see you’re,” Barney paused, biting his lip, and sighed. “You’re still their leader.”

She rolled her eyes. “Not for long.”

Barney ran a hand through his messy hair and took a deep breath. “Fine. Whatever. Then do it for me, because right now you’re the only thing keeping me from losing it."

“No.” She stepped back, shaking her head as the water rose around the ankles of her boots. “I’m not going to be the crutch. I can’t be.”

“Alyx, Barney—" Gordon looked desperately between Alyx’s resolute expression and Barney’s pale face, fumbling for the right words. There had to be the words to fix this, to save everyone. “It’s going to be alright. We’re always alright—"

Barney shook his head, rubbing his brow, as Alyx shot him a pitying look.

“We’re not, Gordon,” she said. “We’re stuck in the middle of nowhere, you almost got gutted like a carp today, we’re down a truck and the HEV and this was all fucking  _ pointless. _ ”

“Something’s going to come for us. The famine, the Combine, some plague from the quarantine zones, and you’ll be gone.” She laughed, tears beading up at the corners of her eyes. “How can that be alright?” 

Maybe somewhere out there, there were words that Gordon could say to make this right, to set Alyx’s broken heart, but he didn’t know them. The chords between them tugged and pulled, reaching desperately for him, but he didn’t know how to soothe them. All he had was a killer instinct, a steady hand and a trail of bodies going all the way back to Black Mesa, nothing to kill the starvation nipping at their heels or the isotopes in White Forest’s water. Just the blood on his hands and the contract on his soul.

Gordon blinked, a cold chill working its way up his spine as realization overtook him, as sudden and sharp as a knife in the back.

Of course.

“Well, I have a convoy to endanger,” Alyx announced, dusting the sand off her shirt and wiping at her eyes. “I’m sure I’ll see you the next time something tries to kill us.”

Barney opened his mouth to say something, but she was already marching back up the beach, past the Vortigaunts and the rest of the convoy. A cool wind blew in off the sea, just as foreboding as the look on Alyx’s face as she slipped between the trucks. 

“Fuck,” Barney announced as Griggs and Noriko slid their way down the dunes. He shot a desperate look at Gordon and the receding tide, running a hand through his hair. The end of the highway gave him no answers, and neither did Gordon.


	4. Chapter 4

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A grand finale.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter is the one with the most overt discussion and themes of suicide and self harm, so if that's a concern to you, please hit me up in the comments and I'll do my best to outline any potential issues for you!

It felt like the camp was on autopilot. Light up the campfire, spread tarps and bedrolls around it. Hand out rations (one bar, broken in its packaging), chew them in silence with the rest of the convoy, not making eye contact. Set up water quality tests to run overnight, jury-rigged machinery running off a truck battery. Lay down under scratchy, patched sheets and try to pull them tight enough to keep out the cold. Wait for the adrenaline crash and sleep.

Around him, the Vortigaunts and humans slowly crept into their own bedrolls, their movements slow and heavy with exhaustion. Shaking shoulders and clenched fists finally stilled and relaxed as the moon crept higher in the sky, shimmering a brilliant white on the sea.

Gordon couldn't sleep, no matter how long he shut his eyes and paced his breathing. It’d be easier to face this alert and awake, but his aching, hungry body stubbornly refused rest. His mind was racing, and the note he had written was burning a hole in his pocket.

He groaned and sat up, kicking off his blanket and turning to face the water. It was still and black, fading seamlessly into the night sky. No wind pushed waves across it, no fish, native or alien, disturbed the surface. Its still, black waters faded seamlessly into the night sky, offering no comfort. 

Gordon ran his hand through the black sand, idly tracing shapes into the dirt. An antlion, thorax raised in a threat display. A crude sketch of the radio towers over White Forest. The dome at MIT. The porch of his childhood home, the Space Needle rising in the distance. The black ash painted his hands dark, the dust collecting in his calluses. He frowned and wiped them on his pants.

Maybe it wasn’t soot. Volcanic or something. Black sand like the shores of Hawaii. He’d always wanted to visit, but instead he’d thrown himself into work, never taking a vacation until he was retching into a toilet.

Someone nudged his shoulder and he glanced up from the squiggles in the sand to see Barney take a seat next to him. He scooted over to give him more of the blankets and Barney’s lips quirked up in a smile that didn’t quite reach his eyes. “You avoiding me too?”

Gordon shook his head. “Are you? Missed you last night.”

Barney shifted uncomfortably, fiddling with the seams on his gloves. “‘Course not. I was out hunting with the rest of the convoy. You know how rations are getting.”

“Bad?”

He nodded and continued, signs slowly becoming less sharp and sure. “And I figured you needed a full belly more than me mother henning. Me and Alyx were just stressin’ you out.”

Gordon shook his head. “The Vorts are nice, but they’re not the same. Rather would have had you there.”

Barney fixed him with a long, intense look, like he was trying to solve an especially homicidal rubix cube.

Gordon met his gaze and held it, unwilling to back down. “Why did you go? I was worried.”

Barney fidgeted in place. “Well, you know how Alyx gets when she’s pissed.”

“Today too?”

He shrugged. “She’s still pissed. I’m gonna respect that.”

“Not at you. Mostly.” Gordon frowned. “We’re the only people she can talk to about this, at least while we’re out here. We have to be there for her.” 

Barney grimaced and raked a hand through his greasy hair. The grey was coming in thick and fast at his temples, and the two day stubble on his jaw was already silver. Gordon watched patiently as he raised his hands to speak, but they only balled into fists and fell to his sides. Barney pulled his legs against his chest and buried his face in his knees. His lips moved, but Gordon couldn’t read them.

He reached out and shook Barney’s shoulder. “Barney?”

He said something else.

Gordon huffed and jostled his shoulder again. “Sign. Please.”

Barney wiped his eyes, squared his shoulders and took a deep breath. “Gordon, I don’t know how much longer I can do this. If I can keep doing this.” 

Something twisted in Gordon’s chest. “Doing what?”

“All of this.” Barney stared out over the dead waters, refusing to meet his eyes. “Keep an eye on White Forest, make sure Kleiner’s eating, help Eli strategize, play mole, protect the convoy, protect you, protect Alyx.” His lips twisted bitterly. “Been doing a great job lately, huh?” 

“We’re not dead,” Gordon said, for lack of anything else. “You got people out of City 17 before the reactor blew. We made it out of the Outlands. Alyx and Eli and Kleiner and I are still alive. You’re doing fine.”

“I’m fucking not. This famine’s going to roll in, this—" He waved his hands at the camp, the sleeping rebels, the dying fire—“Is all gonna go to hell, and something will snap and I’ll do something I wish I’ll regret but won’t.”

“You can’t know that.”

“I can,” Barney said. “I’m fucked up, Gordon. This is just how it always goes.”

“Barney.” Gordon bit his cheek, anxiety bubbling up under his skin. “You’re not.” 

“Black Mesa,” Barney slashed his index finger across his brow and sliced a box in the air, moving with a suredness and anger that startled Gordon. “Gordon, do you know what I did during the Resonance Cascade?”

“You got out with Kleiner, Eli and Alyx,” Gordon signed slowly. “Ended up in the same transport.”

“No.  _ During _ the Cascade, Gordon.”

He shook his head.

“After the elevator went, I was walking through Sector G on foot, shooting crabs, running out of bullets,” Barney smiled, but it didn’t reach his eyes. “You remember those dweeby little bullet proof vests? Turns out that they don’t last more than a few hits. I realize that when one of the Vorts throws me off a goddamn balcony.”

Gordon winced.

“But lucky me, there’s half a palette of medkits and the guy who was trying to use them. Guard. Not my shift, but I knew his face.” Barney’s hands shook and he squeezed them tight, trying to hold off the tremors. “He’s dead, pelvis crushed by something, and all I can think is ‘Thank God the gun’s alright, I can reload. Thank God the latches on the vest aren’t stuck, I don’t gotta cut it off him.’” He took another deep breath, forcing it down like a bellow. “Then I get up and I keep going.”

Gordon reached out and squeezed his shoulder. “Barney, I did the same thing. I was looting—" he slipped into the pidgin for it, an ugly slur of the signs for death and persist—“too. It’s okay.”

“I’m betting you didn’t start hoping for it,” Barney snapped. “I’m sitting in the shadows in a dead guy’s gear, watching some marine gun down another guard, and all I can think is ‘Great! Glad he didn’t go for a headshot, I need a new helmet. Hope there isn’t too much lung on the vest.’”

Barney’s fingers flew out cheerfully, but his face was a death mask as he continued. “Then Eli asks me to go undercover and I start getting used to it. Couldn’t keep my squadmates off that guy, oh well! Hope he was at least carrying something good. Raid a tower block? It’s fine, I’m just doing my job. Behind on my beating quota?” He spread his hands wide like a carnival barker. “Citizens of train station 17, step right up and see who gets to save my hide! And then—" 

Barney blinked hard, remembering, and his hands finally stilled. 

“You were a mole in a warzone. You did what you had to do,” Gordon said.

“Gordon, how fucking many times can you ‘do what you need to do’ before it stops being desperation and just starts being who you are?” Barney asked. “Black Mesa wasn’t my career plan. I wanted to join the academy, back before I nearly flunked outta Martinson, go play cops and robbers with other people’s lives. I was always like this. A goddamn Metrocop, through and through.”

Barney’s hands flew out, ready for a new tirade, but Gordon grabbed him before he could go on, pinning his arms against his sides in a crushing hug.

Barney’s breath was hot and halting on the back of his neck. He twisted in Gordon’s grip, trying to shove him back, but gave in and stopped struggling. His hands were moving behind Gordon’s back, out of sight. There was no way to talk, but maybe that was for the best. Gordon had never been one for words.

If someone could forgive Barney, if anyone could, and take the weight of decades off his shoulders, it wasn’t Gordon. He had missed too much, had too much blood on his own, unfeeling hands. Still, even if he couldn’t give him absolution, maybe he could give him this, if only for a moment.

Gordon held him for a minute longer, until Barney’s breathing slowed and he couldn’t feel his heart hammering through the heavy armored chestpiece. Barney was solid as ever, but Gordon couldn’t help but imagine him slipping through his fingers like smoke, the wind stealing him away someplace he could not follow. 

Finally, Barney pulled away and Gordon reluctantly let him. He ran a hand down his face, wiping at his red eyes. “I can’t play Alyx’s uncle, her mole, her lieutenant. Not with this—" He pulled at the fabric of his uniform—“underneath it.”

“Alyx doesn’t need that,” Gordon said sharply. “She’s family, not an audience. Quit trying to play a role. All she really wants is you to be there, as yourself.”

Barney sighed, raking a hand through his hair. “Gordon, how the hell am I supposed to be someone I don’t know?”

Gordon shrugged and grabbed his hand. He worked his fingers under the heavy rubber prised the glove off. “You’re not going to figure that out in this thing.”

The ridges of Barney’s tattoo slid beneath his fingers as he went for the other glove, Barney watching him with silent fascination as he peeled it off. Gordon balled up the gloves and resisted chucking them into the water, instead going for the zipper tab on Barney’s jacket. Barney’s eyebrows shot towards his hairline and he grabbed Gordon’s wrist.    


Gordon let go. “What?”   


“Don’t you that’s pushing it a bit?” Barney laughed, not quite meeting his eyes. “I mean—"

“You don’t want to be a Combine?”   


“Gordon—"

“Yes or no?”

Slowly, Barney nodded.   


“Then quit dressing like one. You’re not undercover. We’re not in a fight. It's not going to fix what you did.” Gordon grabbed one of the belts and unlatched it, throwing it onto the dirt. “It’s just making you feel like shit.”

Barney didn’t meet his eyes. Gordon leaned forward and yanked the zipper open, peeling the heavy padded coat off him and tossing it onto his bedroll.   


He had a white tee on underneath the jacket, ragged at the edges and spotted with the faint brown stains of washed out blood. The collar had been shredded, a rip going from just below the band down to beneath his collar bone. Gordon was suddenly well aware of how much broader Barney was than him, the muscle jumping in his arms when he tensed. 

He frowned, planning the next attack. The jackboots were also probably a good idea to ditch. Living life at 5’6” built character.

“Christ, Doc, I can do that myself,” Barney grumbled and waved Gordon off his boot. His calves and feet were bundled in gauze underneath, padding to keep off blisters and chilblains. “What, you’re going for my fly next?”

“Don’t tempt me,” Gordon bit back before he could think about it and froze. “I mean—"

Barney was giving him a long, considering look, one Gordon had to struggle not to turn away from. He ought to deny it, pass it off as a joke, but…

They said things were different now. Safe enough to let lie.

He shook his head and sighed. “I know it’s been twenty years,” Gordon said, leaning forwards on his elbows. “I know things have changed. I’m different, you’re different, but I still know you.”

Barney froze, the boot still dangling in his hands.

“A lot of shit happened. Bad shit we’re both responsible for. But you’re still my best friend, even under all of this.” He waved a hand at the pile of clothes. “Whoever that is, you’re not going to find him hiding behind Alyx. It’s not going to help either of you.” 

Barney said nothing for a long minute, letting out a long breath. He reached down to quickly squeeze Gordon’s hand. “Thank you. For… knowing me. Keeping your head through all this. Being, well, normal. Even when things aren’t.” He smiled and tapped his knuckles together. Physics with a G. “Just Gordon, after everything.”

Gordon nodded, picking at the calluses on his thumb. If he didn’t tell him now, no one would know. Gordon Freeman would live in and die in the past, known only to a contractor in an expensive suit.

Gordon lifted his hands, and for the first time in ages, signed his own name, the same crisp motion he’d been given so many years ago by a teacher.

Barney blinked. “Doc, I don’t know that one.”

“It’s my name,” Gordon signed slowly. “My Deaf name.”

“You never told me.”

“It didn’t matter then,” Gordon said. “But you’re the only one who knows it now.”

“Only one—" Barney blanched as he mulled it over, what must be left of MIT and Seattle, his teacher and his college friends. He shook his head and repeated the motions over and over, until Gordon’s name rolled off his fingertips as easily as breathing. “Do you want me to call you that instead?”

Gordon shrugged. “If you want. But I like your nickname too.”

“I guess we’ll figure it out.” Barney rubbed his eyes, yawning. “Christ, it’s late. I’m not looking forward to dealing with tomorrow, but it’s not gonna get easier with less sleep.” 

“Stay?”

It was selfish, but Gordon couldn’t help himself. Wordlessly, he lifted up the edge of the sleeping bag and watched, slightly amazed, as Barney nodded and shuffled in. He set the edge of it back down so Barney was covered, and wriggled over so he’d have more room. It was a narrow bedroll, but there was just enough space for two if Barney lay on his side. 

The wind was coming off the water again, blowing sparks and smoke from the smoldering fire pit into the sky. Gordon watched them fade upwards, knowing he’d be joining them soon.

“We get to choose what we do now,” Gordon said. “We get to pick what we are.”

Barney nodded, accepting the lie, as Gordon lay down next to him on the bedroll. He shut his eyes and pressed his cheek into the pillow and waited, soaking up Barney’s warmth where they touched. Barney’s breathing eventually slowed and his hand relaxed where it had come to rest on Gordon’s wrist, and Gordon knew he was truly asleep.

He slowly pulled away, gently sliding out of his grip and worming his way out of the bedroll, only pausing for a moment to study Barney’s sleeping face. His face was unlined, relaxed for the first time in what felt like years, and his bangs flopped into his eyes. 

Gordon grimaced and tugged the blanket higher on Barney’s shoulders. It was hard to leave him, but harder to think what was to come. Easier to just get it over with and make his choice. Forget sleeping, if he waited another minute, he knew he’d never go.

He brushed Barney’s hair behind his ear and tucked a note he’d never be able to remember under his hand. He shot a glance over his shoulder, but the camp was fast asleep. 

Carefully, he leaned in and pressed a kiss to Barney’s temple, right over the scar on his hairline. His skin was warm and desperately alive, gritty with a week’s worth of grime and tasting faintly of salt and sweat. Gordon’s pulse thudded in his ears. Crossing no man’s land, wading through nuclear waste, it had all been easier, safer, than this.

He stood, looking over the sleeping forms of the convoy. The Vortigaunts, huddled in a warm pile, Noriko curled near the embers of the fire pit. He took a deep breath, taking in the ratty polyester fashion and painted hoppers and crumbling eighteen wheelers and hunger pang faces and everything else that made the Resistance so human, and committed it to memory. No going back.

He circled the camp, tracing his fingers over the still metal of the trucks, until he finally found the tarp spread out in the shadow of Arlene’s eighteen wheeler. Alyx had left her toolbox and spare resin behind, stacked neatly next to the carapace of the HEV suit.

It was still obviously broken. The gash in the side had been cleaned and the melted plastic sheared away, but the damaged plating and surgical tubing were still gone. Gordon pulled on the layers in silence, struggling with the zippers and clasps. It was a trial without Barney or Alyx to help heave the heavy plating on, but eventually he managed to get the armor over his shoulders. The HUD blinked in front of him, flashing a diagnostics list.

Gordon closed it. Wherever he went after this, the HEV suit would be in sparkling condition. Ruins and rubble would align themselves in careful paths for him to traverse. There would be a grenade cache before every gunship and chopper, and medkits and power cells after every blowout firefight. A paradise for the violent. His contractor had never been chintzy when it came to Gordon’s tools.

He snapped his fingers, the thick material of the gloves scraping together. One more thing. Couldn’t forget the most important part.

He clicked open the old red toolbox, sifting through it by the glow of the HEV’s flashlight. In the bottom, under piles of screws, wrenches and tools Gordon had never seen before 2020, Alyx had stashed a Colt Magnum. Gordon checked the chamber and slid it into the holster at his waist.

He sighed and turned to the black water, boots sinking deep into the dark sand. 

It was waiting for him: the tram floated inches above the glassy surface of the sea, reflected moonlight shimmering on its underside. It was as crisp and untarnished as the day it had first been installed on the monorail, the polished aluminum glittering in the night. Gordon wondered if it was a construct, a trick of the senses, or if his employer had stolen it from Black Mesa like he had Alyx. Like he had him. 

He stepped out into the dead sea. The muddy water swirled in eddies around his knees and as it began to creep up to his thighs, the sand rose up in front of him, forming a long, narrow sand bar just beneath the surface of the water. Silt billowed behind him as Gordon followed the path home.

Gordon considered himself an expert on many things. The Oregon trail, elevator shafts, murder, maybe even Barney Calhoun, but above all, he knew when to quit. It was something born of constant struggle, constant refusal to die. After what felt like a life of looking down the barrel of Marine guns and Combine rifles, he knew when to fold.

When the HECU had bashed him over the head with his own crowbar and dragged him off to die, he hadn’t struggled. When a strange man in a strange mask in a strange land had shoved a crackling stun baton in his face and demanded he pick up litter, he had acquiesced. When his employer had dragged him from the shallow confines of space and time and offered him a deal, he had bowed his head and stepped off the tram.

This was no different. Whatever pain the future brought, Barney and Alyx didn’t need him to fight it. They didn’t need another mouth to feed when the Combine’s rations ran out and famine came to White Forest, didn’t need him eating up resources when morphine withdrawal finally set in and they didn’t need a killer, now that the world’s greatest evil was once again resource management. Gordon’s sword would never be beaten into plowshares, no matter how hard he tried.

He had reached it. Gordon watched his reflection waver in the windows as the iris scanner blinked green and the door slid open. He glanced back at the shore, but the camp had been swallowed by the darkness. He took a deep breath and stepped inside.

The tram was just as he remembered it. The blue pleather seats smelled faintly chemical, the fans pumped the musty Black Mesa air in from the tunnels, and the entire tram buzzed with the faint vibrations of the motors. The fluorescent light flickered softly, casting odd shadows across the car. They striped down the seats and twisted away from their sources at strange angles, pooling at the glossy loafers of the man in the suit.

“Gordon Freeman,” the man signed, holding his name in cold, lifeless hands. “While I was aware of your, ah, habitual lateness when I hired you, I had hoped you would not let that  particular habit continue.”

Gordon bowed his head and circled a fist over his chest. “I’m sorry. I reconsidered.”

The man watched Gordon sit opposite him with glassy eyes. “It’s fortunate that you are a hard man to replace. None of your alternatives had the temperament for this line... of work.”

Gordon winced and fell onto a seat as pain cracked across his temples. Something churned in the back of his mind: a breaching ship, a pair of gauntlets, an incomprehensibly huge sphere of latticed metal orbiting a star. The images were gone the moment he tried to parse the details, like trying to catch water in a sieve.

The man didn’t react, but Gordon swore he saw something flare in the hollow pits of his eyes. The tram shuddered to life, and Gordon watched the shore slide further and further away as the car trundled out to sea, following some invisible rail. Soon there was no way to tell exactly where the water ended and land and sky began, only the bright glitter of the moon on the water, the glow of the tram’s headlights and the distant stars.

The man stiffly leaned back in his seat, a poor mockery of human comfort. “While I commend your dedication—" the man paused halfway through the gesture to suck in air—“to the Earth Resistance, our contract with them is long past due. I am sure that you would like to avoid them accruing any, ah… unnecessary debt.” He stilled for a moment, smacking his lips. “There is nothing more you can do for them.”

Gordon nodded and shifted uncomfortably, making the seat groan under the weight of the suit. “What’s the next contract? Where am I going next?”

The man sniffed. “I am, you are aware, not at liberty to discuss the specifics with you. While there have been several… interesting offers from the Universal Union, and the creature formerly known as Wallace Breen—" 

Gordon bolted to his feet, heart jackhammering in his chest as he reached for his holster. The man waved a hand and his legs locked, sending him stumbling back onto the cheap pleather seats, clutching at the frozen muscle. The man stared at him for a long moment, assessing him like a bug skewered on a pin.

Gordon swallowed the fear and held still. Right. He was here for a reason.

“Let me finish, Dr. Freeman,” the man chided, giving him a look that might have been indulgent, were it on a face capable of indulging anything. “There have been  _ offers, _ but thanks to Ms. Vance and you, my superiors consider them… hm. Below our paygrade.” The man’s eyes flashed a brilliant blue and Gordon inexplicably tasted copper. “Lucky you.”

Gordon grimaced. “Lucky me.”

The man flicked a spidery hand out, and the air turned to plasma as a portal cut a hole into existence, bobbing at chest height in front of the door. “I believe this is your stop, Dr. Freeman. I look… forward to observing your next assignment.”

Gordon didn’t move. The man frowned, skin and fat creasing in all the wrong places. 

“Earlier, you said we were renegotiating a contract. I want payment,” Gordon said, flicking his fingers out sharply. “White Forest lives through the winter. The famine doesn’t get them.”

The man in the suit narrowed his eyes until they were nothing but two luminous blue slits in the mask. “You assume…” Pause. Spasm of the fingers, jitter of the head. “That this is a deal.”

“Last time it was my life. This time it’s White Forest.”

“You were an investment. There are other outposts far more capable of advancing my Employer’s plans.” The portal burned brighter, sparking orange and green as it burrowed into reality like a taproot. Outside, the moon shattered and swept across the void, breaking apart until the pieces were nothing but thin lines, spiking across the black. “You are in no place to barter, Doctor.”

Contracts could be negotiated. There was always something to give up, something left to lose. “If you don’t, you give up an asset. Firefight, bottomless pit, alien wildlife. Doesn’t matter.”

The man tilted his head and raised a thinning eyebrow. “You expect me to believe you would simply… roll over and die? After Xen, the Citadel? You underestimate yourself.”

He took a deep breath. Pain was never a worry. Death was inevitable. Loss was a horrible, aching constant.

Gordon calmly pulled the Magnum from the holster at his waist. He opened the chamber with steady, practiced motions and held it up for the man to see. Six bullets, each strong enough to kill a Vort in a single spray of viscera. He clicked the cylinder back in place and shoved the muzzle into the gap between his helmet and the neck guard.

The man stared him down, entirely and unnaturally still. His chest never rose. The slight draft weaving through the tram never stirred his hair or collar. 

Gordon held firm. His hands had never wavered with a gun in them, and they did not shake now.

He wasn’t sure how long they stood there, locked in stalemate as the car hurtled through the space between the stars, between life and death. The distant points of light flickered out, until the only thing left outside was a darkness deeper than Gordon had ever known. Finally, the man sighed and raised his hands. “Decisive as ever, Dr. Freeman. Your… associates live.”

He waved a spidery hand and the air shifted, the very threads of spacetime rippling and buckling. Gordon shivered as the chords reordered themselves, writing new terms. It no longer hurt, not now that he was willing. There were no other ties to get in the way.

“I have been patient with you, Freeman. Far more patient than my colleagues and superiors have considered wise.” The man’s eyes flashed bright enough to leave spots in Gordon’s vision and the taste of metal filled his mouth. “Consider this your final warning. Any failure, any hesitation, and your,” the thing’s lips twisted in a crude, papery approximation of smile, “deal is null. I need not tell you the consequences.”

Gordon bowed his head and stepped forward. What did it matter? Feast or famine, Earth or Xen, he had always been trapped in a box, a briefcase, owned body and soul by circumstance and survival. This was only a trade in masters.

The portal grew brighter, pulsing stygian blue and hyperbolic orange. Gordon reached for it. Experience told him it would be more sudden and painless than falling asleep. Another death, to match the bowels of Black Mesa and the peak of the Citadel.

The portal sputtered like a flame in the wind, and all at once the tram was thrown by some enormous outside force, sending him stumbling across the car. Everything from the bulbs in the ceiling to the screws holding the seats in place rattled, and in the corner of his eye, the man turned to the tram door, lip curling back in disgust. Gordon froze and followed his gaze, watching as the door buckled in, the metal shearing and stretching like taffy. Blackness crept in where the metal split open, oozing into the tram like a flood.

His employer locked eyes with him, and Gordon felt a surge of panic at the blame in his eyes. Another blow shook the tram, sending it toppling end over end. Gordon scrambled for the handrail, clinging to it as the tram flew into a full on roll, tossing his gun across the car.

The man stood at the center of it all, moored to something deeper than the matter of the train. He regarded the tram with cool disdain as they spun, Gordon and the Magnum orbiting him like a black hole.

Desperate, Gordon reached for him, trying to cling to the weight of their contract, the constant of a weapon in his hand and a corpse at his feet.

The windows of the tram exploded inwards before the man could react. Shattered glass sparkled under the fluorescent lights and the car was lost in the sudden, familiar rush of void.

When Gordon opened his eyes (if he opened his eyes), there was nothing but cool darkness, pressing in on all sides. He raised a hand to feel through the void, but his limbs felt heavy and slow, as if the air had turned to honey. It was familiar, not for the memory of it, but the absence of feeling. There was a twenty year gap of nothing but hazy blackness and crushing tired, remembered only on the edge of sleep.

Stasis. 

It made sense, he supposed. He was a trophy, just like the tram car. It figured that the rest of the man’s collection would be kept near by, as far as near meant anything here. One way or another, he had reached his goal.

His eyelids drooped lower as the chill worked its way into his bones. It wouldn’t be long now. He’d be pulled out someday, somewhere far from White Forest and the dead Earth. He wouldn’t have to worry anymore. All he’d have to do was survive. He’d feel better then, less hollow with a gun in his hands and an endless parade of battles to distract him from the thought of Alyx and Barney, of White Forest.

Pain shot through him. Something clawed in his chest, sinking teeth deep into his ribs, his lungs, his beating heart. Gordon pulled in on himself, the heavy plating of the HEV scraping together as he curled in around the wrenching ache in his chest. Broken chords yanked and tore at what was left of their anchors. They pulled him in like a fish snagged on a line, awkward and helpless to take out the hooks.

Something grabbed his hand, holding tight enough to crush bone even through the HEV’s padded gloves. A second hand braced itself on his wrist, straining against the stasis. Panic surged through him. Alyx.

How could she be here? After everything, she had followed him into the monster's jaws. Gordon couldn’t protect her from Earth’s problems, let alone a capitalist god.

Alyx worked her way up his arm, hand over hand, like if she let go for a second she would lose him. For the first time in his life, Gordon wished he could speak, could scream for her to run and escape. She could still live, survive on what little the Combine had left of their world.

Her hands reached his shoulders, digging in to the seams of the armor as she grappled with the dark. They hooked under the edge of the chest piece and with an all mighty heave, she pulled him into her arms, crushing his head against her chest. Gordon couldn’t see her, couldn’t feel her through the HEV suit, but she was unmistakable. They were two sides of the same coin, two halves of a soul, the ends of the same chord.

Gordon shut his eyes and dug his fingers into her jacket as reality popped and roiled around them, until time existed again and they were kneeling on the sandbar, water up to their ribs. 

There was a thin briefcase floating on the water behind her, silver handle glinting in the moonlight. Its interior was completely black. Alyx’s ribs vibrated under his palms as she screamed, the captions on his HUD scrolling wildly. **[DON’T YOU DARE TAKE HIM** **I’LL KILL YOU]**

Gordon pulled back as far as he could with Alyx still clutching him, just enough to see her face. Her lips were pulled into a snarl and fat tears rolled down her cheeks. Her eyes were fever-bright with panic. 

Gordon didn’t let go. He hadn’t seen her like this since the Advisor had come to White Forest, had…

He shook his head, memories slipping away like water through cupped hands, and let her cling to the HEV’s armor, until the captions stopped scrolling and her breathing had slowed and the briefcase had sunk back into the dark water.

A pale hand reached down and shook his shoulder, and Alyx finally let go. Gordon looked up to see Barney, still half-dressed and shaking like a leaf in the cold. Every Vortigaunt in the Convoy was clustered behind him, bright red eyes glowing in the night. 

“What was that?” Barney signed. His eyes were unfocused as he stared at the place where the tram had been. “You were leaving... but how...” He rubbed his eyes, blinking frantically in the moonlight. “Why can’t I remember?”

“It’s gone now. We’re safe,” Alyx said and slowly stood. She caught Gordon’s eye, and in that moment he knew that she had seen him too, and always had. Bright blue eyes telling you to run across no man’s land, to ramp a car off a cliff, to step into the Citadel’s coffin. The pale, cold hand of the void, always beckoning. “It only takes the willing.” She stared down at Gordon, the moon at her back, waiting for him to admit it.

Gordon dug his fingers into the sand, but he had as much of a grip on the silt as he did on the panic bubbling in his throat.

“Gordon?” Alyx frowned and nudged his shoulder. “Hey, say something, please—"

“I broke the contract,” Gordon said, water dripping off his fingers. “That was my last chance.”

Barney looked frantically between him and the Vortigaunts as they began to vibrate, gnashing their teeth and flexing their claws as they spoke to each other in Vortigese. Alyx’s eyes had gone wide enough that Gordon could see the whites the whole way round, and the color had drained out of her face.

“No, no, no, no, no.” Alyx paced back and forth through the water, tapping her fingers together over and over. “Gordon, what did you do? What did you give that thing?”

“Nothing it didn’t have already,” Gordon said and pulled himself to his feet, wincing as the world tilted around him. He squinted at the moon. It was at its zenith now, a far cry from its post at the horizon when he had left. How long had he been gone?

“What does that mean? What were the terms?” Alyx rounded on him, fingers sharp and pointed. “Gordon—"

He took a deep breath and squared his shoulders. “My life for White Forest.” 

Alyx stared at him, incredulous. “White Forest!? White Forest is fine, why would you do that?”

“The famine is coming,” Gordon said. “He told me you’d make it through the winter.”

“There’s a famine every year,” Alyx signed, like it was normal, like it was fine. “You don’t think I can manage a few lean months?”

“You didn’t have hundreds of refugees at White Forest before.” Gordon’s hands flew out, unexpectedly desperate. “The Combine isn’t sending supply lines into a crater. Any of the rations left in the city are practically glowing.” 

They were staring at him. Four human eyes and two dozen red ones looked him up and down like he was speaking gibberish. 

“Where are we going to find enough food to feed hundreds of people? There’s nothing bigger than a squirrel in those woods.” His breath was coming faster. Why were they looking at him like that? 

“Do you need me to bomb a supply train? Raid an outpost? Liberate a city? Just tell me who to shoot and I’ll do it. But if you can’t, then this is all I have!” He scratched frantically at his palms, trying to reach the skin through the thick gloves. They itched for his crowbar, the Magnum, something to-

He shook his head. “Please. I have to go back. I can’t kill a famine. I can’t watch you starve.” 

“Gordon, do you really think that’s what I—what we—want from you?” Alyx asked, sign slow, controlled. “To go out, gun someone down, rinse and repeat?”

“If it’s not, then what am I here for?” Gordon sliced his hands through the air. “I can’t do anything in the lab—none of the papers make sense anymore. Heavy lifting? I know how much it takes to keep the HEV running. Sit pretty and be a symbol? Good luck trying to manage my morphine addiction when the drugs run out.”

“You’re my partner!” Alyx’s fists slammed down into the water. “I don’t need you to kill fascists or steal supplies, I need you to have my back! To stay!”

She wiped her eyes, smearing saltwater and tears across her face. “Do you think we wouldn’t keep you safe? We wouldn’t help you? That we’d let the whole base just starve?”

He dug his fingers into the elbow of the HEV suit, gripping the thin padding as tight as he could, until skin and fat caught in the joints of his glove. It hurt. That was good. Pain was easy, grounding. 

A pair of green hands reached up and pulled his wrist away. When he stopped struggling, the Vortigaunt let go. 

“Gordon.” It took him a minute to recognize it, how the Vortigaunt’s claws hooked in a rough imitation of Barney’s nickname. Their sign was slow and halting, barely intelligible with only three fingers. “There is no heroism in pointless sacrifice. Nothing could indebt us to you more. There is nothing to prove.”

The Vortigaunts stepped closer, swarming around him. “Sib, a blow to you is one to all of us, no matter the source. Have we not hurt enough?”

Gordon looked up into patient red eyes, and felt a choked sob work its way up his throat. He stumbled, looking for a foothold on the shifting sand beneath his feet, and fell to his knees, desperately trying to scrub at his eyes through the visor of his helmet.   


It didn’t make sense. He wasn’t hurt, the man hadn’t come back yet, nobody was dead yet, but the tears wouldn’t stop coming. 

The vortigaunts buzzed and hummed around him, awkwardly patting him on the head and scraping their claws against the HEV’s plating. However distressed they looked, it was nothing compared to Alyx. She had gone pale, looking down at him like she didn’t know what she was seeing, like Gordon Freeman crying was a violation of everything she knew. 

“Gordon?” She stepped forward, then pulled back, eyes darting everywhere like she was hunting for a cue. “Talk to me, please.”

Gordon didn’t know what to say, how to fix this when everything was crumbling apart. He threw his fist against his chest, tracing a circle over and over, apologizing for something he didn’t even understand. 

“Sorry, I just—I can’t deal with this. I just can’t.” Alyx scrubbed furiously at her eyes, her chest rising in short, shallow gasps. “I can’t do this—"

Alyx turned and, for the first time he could remember, ran away. 

Gordon watched her go, paralyzed. She had faced down striders and stalkers with nothing more than a pistol and her EMP tool. She had overcome death itself, had stood in the face of insurmountable odds so many times. The thought of something scaring her like this seemed impossible, but here he was, watching her retreating back.

The Vortigaunts buzzed next to him, wringing their hands.

**[HEY I’LL LOOK AFTER HIM]** Barney said, wading over to him. **[KEEP AN EYE ON ALYX FOR ME]**

They thrummed, the water rippling around them.

**[HE WON’T GO ANYWHERE]** Barney put a hand on his shoulder and squeezed.  **[PROMISE]**

Slowly, reluctantly, the Vortigaunts nodded and rose. One gently brushed a claw across the visor of Gordon’s helmet, tracing a hairline fracture in the glass. They nodded to him and turned towards the shore. In moments, they were too far from his flashlight to see, vanishing into the dark like a funeral procession.

After a long minute, Barney let go of his shoulder. “Look, I don’t know what you did. I can’t—" Barney’s brow furrowed, eyes going blank as he struggled for the memories. He shook his head. “Fuck it, I don’t need to. But it was bad. For you. For all of us.”

He reached into the water and scooped out the Magnum. With a flick of his wrist, the chamber popped open: six bullets glinting in the beam of Gordon’s light, safety off. Barney gave Gordon a long, desperate look and emptied the rounds into the sea. He shoved the barrel back in place, clicked the safety on, and shoved it into the waistband of his pants. “I don’t know what you were going to do, but I sure hope it wasn’t that.”

Gordon wanted to deny it, to rattle off more excuses, but none came. He ran his fingers across the neck seal of the suit, where he had pressed the muzzle into his windpipe. It had been so easy then. It had felt so simple, a clean end to a long and messy story.

“Gordon, you know there’s one thing I can’t deal with.” Barney’s sign was slow, careful. He reached around to the back of the helmet, undid the latch, and carefully eased it off of Gordon’s head. He set it under his arm, where the water couldn’t reach the delicate circuitry.

“Hey, look at me.” Barney’s hand, warm and calloused, cupped his jaw, tilting it up. His touch was gentle, like he was handling something both precious and fragile. “I can’t lose you again. I just can’t.”

“I can’t either.” Gordon fought the tears, blinking hard, and lost. Something wretched worked his way up his throat and he wailed, screaming for Seattle and his childhood home, for MIT and Innsbruck, for the bodies buried under the rubble of Black Mesa, all the people he’d never see again, the foods he’d never taste, the world he’d left behind. For the first time since he stared up at the broken anti-mass spectrometer, he wept. Hot tears rolled down his cheeks, sticking in his beard and catching in the crease between his neck and HEV suit. Barney reached out and Gordon seized his wrist with both hands, holding onto him like a lifeline.

It was gone. It was all gone. 

“Please,” Barney said, enunciating so Gordon could read his lips and didn’t have to let go. “I know that everything,” Barney paused and took a deep breath, “ _ Everything  _ is worse now. I know it feels like there’s nothing left, and maybe there isn’t but… Please. Just stay. Promise me you’ll stay.”

Gordon nodded and consigned himself to the present, clinging to Barney and trying to weather that burning in his chest, an old familiar ache that even the end of the world had not changed. Maybe it had always churned in him, a quiet, implicit threat of something worse to come, something breaking the fragile bubble they lived in.

Walking home from a friend’s apartment on the bad side of Boston, scared of missing a cop he couldn’t hear. Reading about the endless bloodshed in the Middle East as America killed for oil. Al Gore pleading with the nation as summers grew hotter and hotter and billionaires covered their ears.

Nothing could compare to the utter desolation of the Combine, but maybe the world had always been ending and Gordon had always known it, long before he had ever held a gun or shot someone. Maybe, for all its coveted mundanity, the past had been as burnt out as the future, but the apocalypse had been quieter, easier to shove to the back of his mind.

He glanced down at his hands, desperately clutching Barney’s wrist. He’d laid his other hand over them and was slowly brushing his thumb over the orange plating. It was a pointless gesture. Gordon couldn’t feel anything through the thick gloves, let alone Barney’s touch, but it still made his heart stick in his throat.

They could have never had this back in Black Mesa. Anything close to it and Gordon lost his nerve, flitted away and blamed it on alcohol or stress. He buried it, tried to pretend he was only an outsider on one axis, that there wasn’t anything to the rumors. Easier, safer never to admit it, to put it in a box and never confront it.

It would have been the same for Griggs and Sheckley. Maybe they would have been braver than Gordon, found each other despite everything, but they would have had to deal with the bitter looks, the implicit threats, the scales always stacked against them. 

The Vortigaunts, too. Gordon hadn’t been ready for them in 2000. They had attacked first, and he had accepted that as the start and end of their being. Everyone in Black Mesa had, from the marines topside to the biologists in the dissection labs deep below the surface. Their alliance, their forgiveness, wasn’t something they could have earned then. 

The world had been dying, then and now. War and famine, conquest and pollution, the great universal constants. At least here and now, they were struggling together. For all its scarcities, the future was kinder. People were better.

Maybe if the world had always been over, then it could always be starting.

For the second time that night, Gordon leaned in and kissed Barney. It went a little wide, bumping against the corner of his eye rather than his cheek, but he had done it. No turning back. No regrets.

“Gordon—" Barney looked vaguely concussed, pawing at the line of his cheekbone, like he couldn’t believe what had just happened. “I. What?”

“Sorry. Been thinking about that for ages. Don’t know how long. Repressed it.” Gordon could feel his pulse in his ears, knew he was signing too quick for Barney’s rusty ASL, could barely care. “Talk later. Need to apologize to Alyx.”

“I—what?” Barney blinked at him as he stood, water falling off the armor in waves. “Wait, where are you—"

Gordon was already running, waves splashing against his side as he tore towards shore. His feet sunk deep into the sand, crunching on dead shells and rocks and sending seafoam scattering in front of him. His chest heaved, sucking in the cold, salty air.

It felt like it took longer to reach camp than it had to leave, but Gordon couldn’t tell if that was the man in the suit or his own racing mind. His boots hit dry sand, and he paused, chest heaving. Half the camp was up, hugging their knees and talking quietly between themselves in the light of the fire.

Arlene looked up from where she was talking with two Vorts, a flickering flashlight looped around her wrist. She was still in her sleep-clothes, an armored jacket hastily pulled over her shoulders. “Freeman?”

“Where’s Alyx?”

“I saw her go that way.” She pointed down the beach, past the trucks and bedrolls. “What’s this about? Are you okay? The Vorts were freaking out, she woke up half the camp—"

“I’m fine, don’t worry,” he signed. “Sorry, gotta go.”

He was off before she could say another word, sprinting across the black, glittering sand. The moonlight cast long shadows across the shore, turning the driftwood and detritus into strange, twisted things in the dark.

He spotted her as he clambered over an old jetty, the treads of his boots skidding on the wet stone. Alyx sat at the edge of the water, seafoam sweeping over her bare feet as she watched the tide press in and out. 

She didn’t look up as he crept over and sat down next to her. “You were right. I was too proud to admit it.”

He frowned. “What?”

“About the famine,” Alyx said, pressing her lips into a thin, flat line. “Supplies are running low, there’s only so many other outposts that can take more people, and I honestly don’t know if we’re going to make it.” 

She sighed. “It was a lot easier to play leader when it was just patrolling White Forest and scouting Crater 17. But everything’s dying, everywhere, and I think of you leaving and having to do this alone and I just—" She shook her head, knocking a few strands of hair loose from her headband.

“Is it selfish for me to want you to stay?” she asked, her sign small. “Even if you have to starve with the rest of us? Am I a bad person for wanting that, my own slice of normal, of 2000?”

Alyx took a deep breath, hands trembling like dead leaves. “Because I want it. I know that this planet is goddamn dead. I’m never going to go to a mall and buy stupid shoes or wake up to birds singing or see real ocean, ever. It’s never going to be like that, be good, again. But I still want it.” 

“Alyx,” he signed. “Earth, in my time, it wasn’t good. I don’t think it was ever good. Police killed people for no reason, even before they started wearing masks. The ocean was dying and the atmosphere was full of chemicals and the people in power didn’t care  _ before _ the Combine came.”

Something in Alyx’s expression cracked. “So it’s never going to get better? It was always wrong?”

He shook his head. “Things did get better. Never fast enough, but people did get better.” He dug his heels into the sand, thinking. “I wasn’t there, but I know things were bad after I—after the Resonance Cascade. You had to grow up with that. I’m sorry.”

Alyx stared at him, the seawind whipping through her dark hair. 

“But you’re one of the most incredible people I’ve ever met. If someone as good as you could come out of something so horrible, I think we’ll be okay.” He frowned and tapped his knuckles together, looking for the words. “And for what it’s worth, if you had to starve, I’d want to be with you. No matter what.”

Alyx scrubbed furiously at her eyes and Gordon laid a heavy arm over her shaking shoulders. 

“It’s sad, isn’t it?” she said, blinking hard against the spray of the waves. “We keep running around in circles, just trying to keep our heads above water. Something’s going to get us eventually, and then we’ll just be gone.”

Gordon ran a hand through the black grains and watched the seafoam swirl in and take the trench, leaving only a flat, glittering pane of sand in its wake. He frowned.

“Even if we don’t make it,” he said slowly, pausing to shake the black silt from his gloves, “this still mattered. We’re not the only ones out there, trying to survive.”

Gordon didn’t have use for legends or folklore. Point A to point B didn’t ask for aspirations or dreams of a better future. But Alyx wasn’t like him. She was better.

“Even if we don’t make it, we still freed City 17. We killed Breen. That meant something to us, to White Forest. Someone out there will remember us,” he said, hands sweeping out wider, louder. “You remembered the old world. You remembered me.”

" Ten, twenty years from now, people are going to know you, no matter what. They’re going to write poems about you, ballads. You’ll have a dozen names and when people need courage, they’ll talk about your story. And they’ll know Eli as Vance’s Dad.” That got a laugh out of her, and Gordon pressed on. “This is your future Alyx. You can’t waste it.”

“And you?” Alyx asked. “Is there room in the future for Gordon Freeman?”

Gordon sighed, pressing a hand to the front panel of the HEV suit, over his aching chest. His throat still felt raw from sobbing, the wind sharp on his cried-out eyes. The adrenaline was fading, leaving him hollow, sore and with a pit he wasn’t sure could be filled. Too many dead. Too much lost.

He ran a hand down his face, feeling the salt crunch in his beard, and shook his head. “I don’t know. But I guess there has to be. I’m still here, aren’t I?”

“There will be. If it’s really my future, I’ll make a space for you. I promise.”

She pulled him into a hug, crushing her face against the plating of the HEV and looping her strong arms around his chest, and after a moment, he returned it and didn’t let go. They held each other, two people lost after the end of the world, and the waves rolled in and out and the campfire glowed in the distance and somewhere a man in a suit watched and waited, but for now they were here, steady under the light of the full moon.

Barney found them like that, panting from chasing Gordon through the surf and across the beach. Alyx wordlessly grabbed him by the wrist and tugged him down onto the cold sand. He slung an arm over each of their shoulders and leaned in, his stubble scratching against Gordon’s cheek, clutching each of them tight.

Eventually, Alyx wriggled free of their huddle and flopped back on the sand. She wiped at her eyes, sand tangling in her hair. “Are we really going to be okay? Any of us?”

Barney glanced between her and Gordon, frowning, and scooted closer to her, settling by her legs. “I think so. I know you can get us there.”

Her eyes flicked from his sopping T-shirt down to his bare feet, like she was noticing his outfit for the first time. “You ditched the uniform.”

Barney scratched the back of his neck, suddenly sheepish. “It seemed a bit fucked to be sleeping in the damn thing. That’s not who I want to be anymore.”

He sighed. “I’m sorry, for earlier. And yesterday. I know you have to do things, things that I don’t want you to have to do to yourself. And it’s… selfish of me to try to stop you, but I don’t know how to support you when it means tearing yourself apart.”

Alyx rolled her mother’s necklace between her fingers. “Then you know how I feel when I see you throwing yourself on every sword you can find.”

“It’s just-” Barney raked a hand through his hair and shook his head. “You were a kid when we blew up the world, Alyx. You shouldn’t have to put it back together. If something happened to you while you were trying to fix our problems, I don’t know how I’d live with myself.”

“Barney, since when has anything been fair? Besides,” Alyx raised an eyebrow, “you’re barely living with yourself now.”

“Yeah.” Barney’s face fell and he stared out at the water, his face a brilliant white in the moonlight. He rubbed the inside of his wrist, his calloused palm scraping over the tattoo. “It’s gotten out of hand.”

She sighed. “Look, let’s make a deal. I’ll do my best to stay out of trouble and you don’t go looking for it. I mean, as much as we can.” Alyx set her jaw. “It’s not worth fighting for this if we’re not together. I need you and Gordon to have my back. I need you here.”

“Just be careful, okay?” Barney asked. “No more risk taking. Talk to me. I want to be your second, but I can’t do that if you don’t let me help.”

Alyx nodded and Barney took her hand, gripping her tight.

She then heaved and brought him down onto the dirt for the second time that night. Barney clawed at the shoulder of HEV suit like a wet cat, bringing Gordon crashing to the ground hard enough to make the driftwood bounce.

Gordon grabbed the two of them by the scruffs of their dirty, soaked shirts and yanked them apart before Alyx dragged him into a wrestling match, pulling them down on either side of him and only letting go when he was sure they’d stay. 

There was an odd wind blowing off the water. It tasted like salt and sand and cold desert nights, as crisp and clear as Gordon’s memories of sitting out on the roof of Black Mesa or the MIT Dome or the front stoop of his parents' house. Alyx inched closer, warming her hands on the heat vents of the HEV, and Barney let his cheek rest on the front console. Gordon struggled to stay awake, bracketed by a terrifying future and a past nearly too terrible to name. 

That was where the convoy found them, sprawled in the sand and watching the sun creep over the horizon and stain the water pink, until morning was upon them and there were no shadows left for them to hide in.

* * *

The sun gleamed on the dead waters of the Black Sea, glinting off of beds of algae and the backs of tiny minnows flitting through the shallows. A crisp, salty breeze blew in off the waterfront, occasionally tossing black sand into the air and catching the hem of Gordon’s sweater.

Alyx was doing rounds, nagging Mary to double check the pH and oxygen tests just to make sure. The results that morning had been better than anyone expected after their first impression of the coast, but she had never been one for half measures. Gordon and Barney watched her from their perch on the hood of Griggs and Sheckley’s truck as she chased Noriko with a clipboard. 

“She’s really putting the fear of God in them, huh?” Barney groused, resting his cheek on Gordon’s shoulder. He signed something else, but Gordon was too distracted by the salt-and-pepper hair brushing his jaw and the warmth where their knees knocked together to see. 

Barney waved his hand in front of Gordon’s nose. “Hey. You still with me?”

“Last night,” Gordon signed. “I kissed you.”

Barney paused, hands hanging in the air. Gordon watched him school his face into careful neutrality. “Do you regret it?”

Gordon shook his head. “Only that I didn’t do it sooner. I was scared.”

Barney sighed, his breath fluttering against Gordon’s collar bone. “Me too. We uh, didn’t talk that much about that sort of thing back then, did we?”

Gordon tilted his fist in agreement. “Wasted a lot of time.”

Barney laughed, teeth flashing in the sun. “Christ, you had no idea how much I ran myself in circles, trying to remember if you ever cussed Ellen out or something. Way to make me feel like a highschooler again, Gordon.”

He settled his head back against Gordon’s shoulder and the two of them watched Alyx struggle with a crate full of incensed bullsquid, trying to get it to chew on some offal long enough to stop drooling acid everywhere. 

“We can take it slow, if you want,” Barney said. “I don’t mind. It’s not like the world’s ending.”

Gordon nodded and leaned his cheek against Barney’s head. “I’d like that.”

Later, as Alyx cracked open cages and the first pack of Houndeyes scampered across the beach, their markings glowing as they sniffed the unfamiliar ocean air, Gordon traced his fingers down the old scars of Barney’s tattoo and slotted their hands together. Barney squeezed back, and together they watched the raggedy foxes, the wide-eyed hares, the pigeon flocks, the lightning dogs and snark colonies, all the animals the convoy had taken, blink at a strange landscape and run towards it full throttle.

Later, as the convoy pulled back onto the road and began its slow march home to hungry White Forest, Barney grabbed him by the shoulders of the HEV suit and pulled him in for a real kiss, lips mashing awkwardly together as the semi-trailer bumped and jostled beneath them. Alyx cheered and signed several things in pidgin that Barney refused to translate, and as the sun sunk low in the sky, nobody mentioned the flash of grey wool and gleaming blue eyes leering from the woods. 

Later, the three of them would come home to Eli and Kleiner and their tiny dorm at White Forest, would scour the old Soviet ghost towns with D0G for non perishables, and maybe, if luck allowed, would even be alright in the strange world they called the present. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you for making it to the end of this fic! I began writing this story back in June, at (one of) the peaks of the pandemic, so a lot of ruminating on 2020 snuck into it. I hope you've enjoyed what ended up being a very personal piece, and that this final chapter lived up to the build up. Thanks for reading!
> 
> I can't say when my next story will be out, but I do know it will probably be about Subnautica and that game's voiceless protagonist (I have a problem, can you tell?). If you're one of the five people interested in Subnautica fanfiction, I guess that could do it for you. Still, I do plan to circle back around to another Half-Life story eventually! I hope to see the rest of you then!


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